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GLENN DIESEN: Welcome, my name is Glenn Diesen and I’m joined by Alexander Mercouris and Professor Michael Hudson. Welcome to the both of you.
Today, I really wanted to discuss the decoupling or fragmentation of the international economy and also now the alternative economic architecture emerging, I would say primarily in the east, but also in other parts of the world. So I thought we can start off by discussing the defining economic challenges of our time.
For those of us who were studying economics in the 90s and 2000s, the big talk was always economic interdependence. This was supposed to be the recipe for prosperity and peace, but these days the rhetoric obviously has changed. Now the main talk in town will be a new international division of power.
So while in the early 2000s the idea was the United States would invent the iPhone and the Chinese could assemble it, this was the distribution of labor, but now of course China has climbed up these global value chains and it can effectively do both, the invention of it and assembly.
Meanwhile, Biden recently argued that if something is invented in the US, it should also be produced there. So it’s a dismantling or repatriation of the supply chains going on.
We also see economic dependence being weaponized, I would say, hijacking of Iranian oil tankers, seizing the Russian central bank assets or simply trying to cut off or cripple China’s access to technology.
So I guess my first question would be what does all of this mean? What are the main trends and what does it mean not just for the United States and China but also the wider world? Will countries such as Germany, which was very much tied into this very liberal economic system, be crushed under the new political economy or what do you see coming?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the United States was always for free trade after World War II as long as it was the most efficient and strongest industrial producer. But now that it’s not the strongest anymore, it’s gone back to the protectionism that in the 19th century built up its industry to begin with.
The problem is at this time, even though the United States and other countries are going protectionist, the United States can’t reindustrialize like it could then because it’s already overloaded its economy with financialization, corporate debt, personal debt, and privatized medical care, privatized education.
The economic overhead of getting a job here and the pay that workers have to get, not simply to eat and get clothes but for medical insurance, for debt service, prices America out of the market. So it really has no alternative but to be autarkic. But it can’t be autarkic because nobody can see how it can reindustrialize. So there’s a kind of rage going on here among economists.
And just today, the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is going to China and said, well, we can’t import the solar panels anymore because China’s government supports them, as if the U.S. government also doesn’t support them and other countries don’t support them. You’re getting a travesty almost of the public statements of why America has to avoid imports from China, impose sanctions on Russia. But the result is there are going to be shortages all throughout economies that are following this withdrawal from international trade.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: That is very interesting. When you say that there’s going to be shortages, will these shortages eventually become self-correcting?
Because I was reading actually, again, there’s been a very interesting statement by the governor of the Russian central bank, Nebulina, who is, by the way, somebody who I think personally, emotionally, was very wedded to the neoliberal, open market, unregulated economic model. She is absolutely astonished at what the effect, the actual effect of the push to a kind of enforced protectionism in Russia has been. And in this statement she says that what’s actually happening, and she says, I can’t explain it, this is astonishing to me, is that investment is rising. Consumer spending is rising. Wages are rising. And in conditions of an investment boom, production is expanding. She says, you know, I don’t quite believe this. I worry that the economy, our Russian economy, is growing faster than capacity, that it’s going to burn itself out in some way.
I mean, it’s a very strange statement, both confident in some respects, panicky in others. This can’t be true. But is that actually what is going to happen? Because this system of everybody being linked up in a single economic system actually has been, I think, a relatively recent thing in terms of, you know, post-British Empire time. Will, in fact, the fragmentation actually in the end lead to a more diverse economic landscape and a more balanced one? I’m just wondering, because Nebulina is now perhaps, I think, starting to, to her own astonishment, wonder whether that might happen in Russia itself.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, economists love to use the word self-correcting, because if economies are self-correcting, you don’t need a government. You can just have the private sector running the economy. And in practice, that means Wall Street.
But there’s no way that the American economy can be self-correcting without a few decades of new investment. You’d have to reinvent the educational system. You would have to take public health into the, health care into the public domain so that you could lower the cost of living so that employers wouldn’t have to pay such high wages. You’d have to provide freer education so that workers don’t graduate into the labor force with so much debt that they need high enough wages to pay the debt. And even so, can’t afford to buy houses.
America, and also, I think, Western Europe, has painted itself into a corner that is now systemic. The whole trend from 1945 to today, all of these 70 years have built up such rigidities that there’s no way that you can break them down. And the idea that somehow there’s a government policy that can fix things won’t work either, unless it’s so radical a policy that it won’t be the current economy anymore.
Nobody’s talking about the need for structural change. They just avoid talking about the debt problem, talking about what makes America high cost. And then, of course, there’s the war spending.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, you mentioned the rent-seeking as something that makes America very uncompetitive. Obviously, extracting, having all this, well, not necessarily oligarchs, but people extracting money through the way their economy’s been financialized, intellectual property, land rights, technologies. This obviously is a burden for the productivity and competitiveness of the United States. But there’s also a sense of rent-seeking internationally through these monopolistic positions. So again, when you have a monopoly in certain areas, obviously, this has economic influence, well, economic consequences in terms of the high profitability. But you also have the ability to extract political influence when there’s a position of economic monopoly.
But yeah, because I remember back in 2009, I think, Putin called the dollar, he called it a leech or something along those lines, which was also suggesting that there was a similar way of extracting wealth. So in other words, the rent-seeking, not just in America, but for the entire international community.
And I was wondering if this goes into what Alexander was mentioning, because for countries around the world, well, then especially countries who have alternatives, be it Russia, if they’re not through intellectual property rights, or the American tech platforms, or debt banks, the use of the US dollar, if they don’t use all this, would it result in less efficiency? Or would it be essentially saving themselves or liberating themselves from rent-seeking from the United States? Would this have anything to do with it, you think?
MICHAEL HUDSON: You put your finger on it. The official US position recognizes that it can’t be an industrial exporter anymore, though how is it going to balance the international payments to support the dollar’s exchange rate? The solution is rent-seeking.
That’s why the United States says, well, what’s the main new rent-seeking opportunity in world trade? Well, it’s information technology and computer technology. That’s why the United States is fighting China so much, and why President Biden has said again and again that China is the number one enemy. It moved first against Huawei for the 5G communications, and now it’s trying to get Europe and American and Taiwanese exporters not to export a computer chip to China, not for the Dutch to export chip-engraving machinery to China. There’s a belief that somehow the United States, if it can prevent other countries from producing high-technology intellectual property rents, then other countries will be dependent.
Rent-seeking really means dependency of other countries if they don’t have a choice to pay you much more money than the actual cost of production. That’s rent, the price over value. Well, the United States, since it can’t compete on value because of the high cost of living and labor here, it can only monopolize rent.
Well, China has not been deterred. China has leapfrogged over the United States and is producing its own etching machinery, its own computer chips.
The question is, what is the rest of the world going to do? Well, the rest of the world means, on the one hand, the global majority, Eurasia, the BRICS+, and on the other hand, Western Europe. Western Europe is right in the middle of all this. Is it really going to forego the much less expensive Chinese exports at cost, including normal profit, or is it going to let itself be locked into American rent-extraction technology, not only for computer chips but for military arms?
I know that France wants to use the fighting against Russia in Ukraine as an opportunity to say, well, let’s rebuild the European arms industry. But the Germans are not particularly in favor of this, and the Americans certainly said, no, no. When we say you have to spend 2% to 3% of your GDP in arms, that means buy American arms, integrated arms. So it’s all about rent-seeking.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: It’s also presumably the reason why we have never succeeded in creating our own social media-type infrastructure in Europe. We have no European equivalents to Google or TikTok, which we’re hearing so much about, the Chinese TikTok, or Facebook, or anything like that. We entirely rely upon the Americans to provide these things for us. And whenever there’s any attempt to produce anything like that in Europe, it always fails, partly because the Americans object to it.
Now, I mean, I know all about this because my brother, I should say, worked for a time at the European Parliament, and he saw the American lobbying systems that operated within the European Parliament at the European level in action, and extremely effective they were.
But this isn’t a mechanism for economic, for technological progress. At least this is how it looks to me. It’s a formula for ultimate stagnation, because you’re locked in to a system which isn’t even, as far as I can see, focused on development. It’s focused on rent, which is a completely different thing.
So you mentioned that the Chinese, you know, you might use the word leapfrog. I understand the Chinese are also thinking of leapfrog. They’re looking at the leapfrog in computer technology. You know, they’re saying that chips are in any way reaching the end of their technological utility. You know, we’ve got to think beyond that. And they are looking to go beyond that and to look for, you know, other systems. I mean, I’m not a technical person, so I’m not going to try and guess what they are.
But I mean, the point I’m making is rent-seeking, it seems to me, what it ultimately causes is technical stagnation. Or am I getting this completely wrong?
MICHAEL HUDSON: There’s also a geopolitical consideration here, and that’s Europe’s role in America’s war against China. Again and again, as I mentioned, President Biden has said China’s the number one enemy, and it’s going to be a 10- or 20-year fight, he says. Well, if it’s a 20-year fight, how do you line yourself up for this? Well, they said the first thing we have to do is to separate Russia from China, because as long as they’re together, they’re a critical mass that can sort of dominate the Eurasian continent and outclass the West.
Well, in order to do this, to sort of prepare for this fight against Russia and China together, and driving Russia apart from China, the U.S. says the first thing we have to do is solidify our control over our satellites, and that is the main satellite is Europe, of course. And that was what the war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian attack on the Russian-speaking Donbas and Luhansk territories was. By starting the war in Ukraine in 2022, the United States could then depict Russia’s protective response, protecting its Russian-speaking population as an attack, and have Germany and Europe impose sanctions.
The sanctions that were imposed in Europe were a windfall for Russia, as I think we’ve talked before. The sanctions were the equivalent of protectionism for Russia. If you don’t export food and manufacturers to Russia, they have to do it themselves, and they’ve done it. The effect of the sanctions all fell on Western Europe, and specifically on Germany. And you have the German de-industrialization there, the chemical industry, the steelmaking industry, and the heavy industry that had been the buttress not only of Germany’s exports and balance of payments, but the whole Eurozone’s balance of payments.
Now this is gone, because not only German industry, but French, Dutch industry, Belgian industry, they’re all forced into a dependence on the United States, not only for liquefied natural gas, talking about rent-seeking, but for arms and for industrial products that can’t be produced at home.
So you have German factories moving to the United States. What’s going to happen to the German labor? Are they going to follow the factories? Unlikely. Are they going to go to China? Because that’s the other alternative. What is going to happen? So you have Europe basically shrinking, although even as it’s shrinking, it’s becoming a larger market for American gas exports, arms exports, and other exports. The squeeze is going to be on Europe industry.
The question is, how long can Europe decide, well, we’d rather be an American satellite than enjoy the mutual investment and trade that we were doing with Russia and China. How long are we going to not make an economic decision? I mean, there goes the materialist approach to economics. The idea is that foreign policy is supposed to be what helps your economy grow. And how do you explain Europe not following this, and how long can an economy follow, a nation follow a policy that is against its economic interests and results in protests?
GLENN DIESEN: This is what I find so strange with the absence of discussions around what’s happening to the economy in Europe. Because a whole, well, not a whole, but a large part of the idea of the European Union after the Cold War was, you know, after the Cold War, you had one central power, and then primarily the United States. But a big part of the idea of the European Union would be for the Europeans to, with collective bargaining power, effectively establishing some symmetry with the United States. So we would have collective hegemony, the dominance of the West, but then with two pillars, the US and Europe.
But to forget that there’s a component there, both competition as well as cooperation. These days, all I hear is, you know, we’re allies, we’re cooperating, as if there’s no, that the Europeans don’t have their interests, which are separate from that of America, often even in conflict.
And I also, a lot of what you’re discussing, it makes me think of Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, because he, well, he hasn’t only discussed the issue of energy and intellectual property rights, but he’s focused a lot on technologies lately, given the growing role of these digital giants. And his main concern is that, well, effectively, Europe’s finished, because as you see, that these digital giants get a greater and greater role in the international economy. The Europeans, they don’t have any of their own. As Alexander said, there is no equivalent of Google or Facebook or any of these large ones, Amazon for that sake. But the Chinese and Russians, they do have theirs. And I think this has been part of the curse that because the United States is an ally, it is a friend, if you want to use the word friend, it has created less urgency to create our own technological sovereignty.
So I think the acceptance of developing this dependence on the United States, it’s the curse of being allies, if you will. And now we see, as Varoufakis argues, he says, there’s no chance for Europe anymore. We will now be permanent. Well, the US will be a rent seeker, and our economy will become less and less competitive as wealth is extracted out.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Glenn, you begin by talking about symmetry and then you change the word to the more appropriate dependency. Dependency is the kind of symmetry that America wants. It’s not an equal symmetry. It’s an asymmetrical dependency. That’s what dependency is, and that’s the aim of US policy, the rent payer and the rent seeker.
And essentially, America is trying to do to Europe what England did with the sterling area before 1945, locking its colonies and Argentina’s holding of sterling into purchases of sterling exports. Well, that’s what dollarization is coming to mean, certainly for Europe, and that’s why the global majority is trying to de-dollarize. They don’t want that kind of symmetry.
GLENN DIESEN: The reason I use the word symmetry is that Albert Hirschman in the 1940s used this word specifically, because whenever we talk about economic interdependence, it’s treated as an absolute gain. So we might be mutually dependent, but one is always more dependent on the other. And when you have asymmetries, you have greater economic prosperity and also this can be converted into political influence. And this is often where the economic competition finds its place, that you want others to be more dependent on you while you want to reduce your dependence on others, because then the whole dilemma of losing some autonomy versus gaining influence is skewed to your favor. So you maximize autonomy and influence and economic prosperity. So I think the symmetry is an appropriate language often, because you would like one side to be more dependent than the other, then it becomes, well, you don’t want it, but then you get this exploitative relationship almost.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Donald Trump has come right out and said, America has to be the gainer in any kind of exchange, unequal exchanges. That’s explicit policy, no mutual gain.
On the other hand, you have China and Russia saying, well, how do we have an alternative to this dollar standard and this U.S. view of a unipolar world order? The only way that they can really create a critical mass that it takes to create an alternative, the Americans call it a split of civilization, is to get other countries to join voluntarily. And that means that China can only, and Russia, can only [attract] the rest of Asia, not to mention Africa and the global South, South America. They can only attract the other bricks into the system by actually offering a better mutual gain. And that entails really creating a whole new set of international institutions, parallel institutions that are different from the U.S., their own version of an international monetary fund, their own World Bank, their own version of the United Nations, or some kind of grouping among themselves. So that really is a different economic philosophy, ultimately. That’s what makes a civilization different.
And the main distinction, what makes one society different from another society? What makes the U.S. and Europe, the NATO, different from the global majority? It really ultimately comes down to how it’s organized financially. Is the financial institution public or is it privatized? How does it handle debt? These are what distinguishes almost every society from another. And if they begin by a financial restructuring, which is the basis of mutual gain, you’re dealing with a completely different economic system.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: I just want to just go back to the Russian economy, because we spoke about protection and how protectionism has been imposed on them, and I think that is certainly a part of what’s happening there. But actually I think there’s an even more important reason.
One of my friends, Russian friend, one of his jobs, in fact he was a treasurer of a big in fact he was a treasurer of a big Russian company. He used to come to Europe and to the United States, speak to banks there about raising loans for his companies in Russia. And I think one of the things that people do not understand is that, especially before the 2008 crisis, but to a very great extent still, right up until 2022, the Russian economy, the entire Russian system, was completely permeated by Western businesses, Western companies, Western providers of funding, of insurance, of various types of services. They were helping in car production, they were involved in all sorts of joint enterprises, things of that kind.
And the money that all of these projects were making was of course flowing back to Europe, principally to Europe, less to the United States. So it was in effect rents. The rents were being paid by the Russians to the Europeans.
2022, that all stops. It stops completely. And suddenly there is a huge amount of more money in Russia because the rents are not moving westwards. And what this is doing is, it’s driving an investment boom because that money, that capital, has to be used.
And not just that, but something else is starting to happen, is that we’re getting reverse engineering happening at an accelerating level. It’s now very common, for example, in the aerospace industry, you know, aircraft, Western Airbus aircraft being taken apart, reverse engineered, the material entering into the Russian industrial system. And of course this is causing a major acceleration.
So we have, I would suggest, the classic case study here of what happens when rent extraction stops. An economy suddenly, at least an economy like the Russian, suddenly surges. And in fact the central bank chair, Nebulina, said that the economy is in the investment phase of growth, which is one of the manifestations of structural transformation. So it is changing completely because suddenly money is staying in Russia instead of going out. Just wanted to say.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s exactly what’s happening. I wish they had turned over all of their housing to the occupants in 1991. I made three trips to the Duma urging that they adopt a land tax to prevent the privatization that had occurred.
Because even if you have oil and real estate privatized, you can collect the economic rents by a rent tax and basically make a profit and that’s it. Obviously this was not what the U.S. authorities wanted. And the Duma members who had brought me over had their elections fixed and were de-elected by the U.S. advisors.
And so what Putin has had to do is recreate the equivalent of avoiding rent seeking without an official rent tax. And he’s been able to do it, as you’ve described numerous times, Alexander, just by sort of jawboning, as they say in the United States, by telling them, look, you cannot make exorbitant rents. And I think President Putin made a speech a few days ago for the election on just that very thing.
And somehow they’ve made it work in Russia. They’ve increased employment and they’ve increased living standards. And I wonder what Europe will think as it sees the European living standards and employment rising and their employment falling. How long can this, this is real instability, is a byproduct of the rent seeking. It’s not something that can constrain mutual full employment. It’s inherently unstable. And yet the United States says, well, we’ve got to keep the system in place for 10 or 20 years until we beat China.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: Well, this is a very good question because, of course, I think you’re putting a, well, first of all, dealing with the housing thing, I can say absolutely that there were people, that there are people today in Russia who perhaps they don’t remember your advice, but if they were reminded of it, they would be very, very sorry that it wasn’t taken because clearly that was the right thing to do. And I think Putin himself would probably agree with you about this.
I mean, he’s very, very focused on keeping housing costs as low as possible and in getting housing built, mass housing. And the priority there in Russia is mass housing, cheap mass housing, not expensive real estate, which runs up very high prices.
Now, this is something which I think they’ve come to gradually without really understanding and thinking through, but it’s often that way in Russia, to be honest.
But the big event that we might be looking forward to at some point in the next 10 years is the point where it suddenly dawns upon people in Britain, Germany, Russia, that for the first time that anybody can remember that people in Russia are better off than we are in Western Europe.
Now, I mean, I’m not saying that’s necessarily going to happen exactly like that, but that would be a revolution of perception. I mean, it would completely transform the political and social geography in Europe.
If we have a situation where people in the West, in Western Europe, feel that they are growing and getting richer and we are not growing and we’re getting poorer, and that they’re not just achieving our levels of living standards, but actually surpassing our levels of living standards, then it’s very difficult to exactly predict how people will respond. But they will respond in a very profound way.
Bear in mind that that has never happened before at any point in modern European history, in fact, in any part of European history. The East has always been poorer than the West.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right, Alex. It’s been an ad hoc response. They’re reinventing the wheel.
And yet the problem that you’ve described was the problem back in the 19th century. Germany faced this problem. How were they going to overtake the English industry? Well, they had the state playing a major role, especially a link between the state, the Reichspunk, and the military-industrial complex.
Same thing in the United States. The classical economists all described the ideal as reducing prices to the actual value, getting rid of the rent-seeking, getting rid of the landlord class. That’s Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Getting rid of the monopolists, getting rid of the private banks and making the—
Central European banking was all based not on paying out dividends to raise share prices, but to reinvest and reinvest and expand.
They’re rediscovering all of these, what to do without any reference to classical economics or to the fact that all of this happened over a century and a half ago.
GLENN DIESEN: No, we spoke before about this, the whole what has happened, how the ideology has changed the ideas of capitalism, because all of this was meant to be common sense. If you want that, yeah, the profits should be invested, or at least you should tax the rent-seekers in order to develop proper infrastructure, provide for proper education, all of these things, which has both enhanced the standard of living, but also makes the companies more competitive internationally.
Alexander and I also discussed before, everything is put on its head these days with rent-seeking not really being seen as the key problem, something one has to diminish, but instead seen as effectively the source of what keeps the economy going to have this system.
I think that’s why it’s so difficult to have real structural change in order to make the economies more competitive again.
Within that area, I wanted to ask you as well, because a huge problem is debt, not just of the countries, but also of individuals. What is the main challenge for debt relief? For example, in the United States, most of the debt is now private versus other countries which have chosen to have the debt public. How is this influenced, if you want to, for example, go down the path of debt relief, in order to have these structural changes which might be necessary?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there are two developments in personal debt that have happened in the last three months. First of all, credit card debt has risen very sharply. The interest rates are now at 20% for the regular interest and over 30 to 35% for the penalty fees.
Now, pawnbroking has gone way, way up. There’s been a huge increase in pawnbroking. People who are not able to get any more leeway on their credit cards, the defaults on credit cards are rising. If you defaulted on your credit card and can’t get more credit, you go to the pawnbrokers.
This is why you have the Democratic economists like Paul Krugman saying, why don’t Americans realize how wonderful an economy President Biden has made for them? Why are they not supporting Biden?
Well, it’s because the economy seems to be doing very well for the campaign contributors to the major political parties. But for the 90% of the population, they’re really being squeezed by the combination of the debt and by the inflation that’s forcing them up, and by the increase in housing costs is the other great squeeze that’s happening.
So how can you get a structural change for that? The only way that you can have a structural change to a debt problem is to wipe out the debt.
Now, President Biden, who was the author of forbidding student debtors to wipe out the debt by bankruptcy, to lock them in and say, there’s no way you can get bankruptcy, we’ll take all of your social security and your parents’ social security for this. There’s no way that you can have a structural solution without writing down the debt.
But how can you write down the debt without hurting the banks? The banks are already suffering from the debt of the commercial property in the United States. There’s a 40% vacancy rate for commercial property.
Imagine if you’re a banker, what do you do? You say, well, we’re going to just postpone it. We’re going to roll it over. We’re going to keep, I guess, lend you enough money to pay the interest.
Well, that’s how Edward III got by in the 14th century, until finally he couldn’t pay and the (unclear) went under, and then the (unclear). We have eight centuries of trying to solve the problem by postponing.
But there’s no one even talking, except us, I guess, about the structural problem that debts can’t be paid.
Just like in 1931, the world realized that German reparation debts and inter-ally debts couldn’t be paid. There was a moratorium.
But how are you going to get a moratorium on personal debts and corporate debts that are going under?
Well, China doesn’t have that problem, because China, the debts are owed to the government. The government can write down the debts to Evergrande and to real estate companies that can’t pay. And they don’t tear down the buildings, the buildings aren’t sold, everything goes ahead.
But when the debts are owed to the private banking system, it’s in trouble. And the banks, you pointed out, Glenn, the banks are the protectors of the rent seekers. They’ve joined as their lobbyists, because the rent seekers borrow money from the banks to buy a rent-yielding operation and pay the rents they’re paying interest.
Well, you have the finance, real estate, insurance, and monopolies all together, pretty much controlling the donor class and controlling the election politics.
You have a quandary. A problem has a solution, a quandary doesn’t. And the only solution to this quandary is so radical a structural change that it’s not even being discussed on the horizon.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: I mean, not just a radical change, but perhaps even in some ways a revolutionary one, because what it amounts to is a fundamental change, ultimately, in the structure of power. I mean, you have to get into a situation where the beneficiaries of the system who have an interest in perpetuating as it is essentially lose control, and that those who are in effect exploited by it are able to basically push back and to restructure the system completely in their own interests, which is a revolution, in effect.
I mean, this is language, by the way. I mean, I’ve noticed, by the way, that I don’t know whether this is the case in the United States, but in Britain the word exploitation never appears anywhere today in media. It is not ever used in politics. It is not used at all, as far as I understand it, in discussions amongst economists. I wonder whether this is true in the United States.
But anyway, I mean, it is a revolutionary change.
MICHAEL HUDSON: You said the word. You’re absolutely right.
GLENN DIESEN:I was curious though, what are the possible alternatives? Because the key problem everyone seems to, well, most of the world appears to be waking up to, which is that the current economic system organized almost solely around the United States is beginning to, well, fracture to a large extent because of the debt.
But of course making the matter much worse is also, as the United States’ position in the international economy weakens, it also becomes much, much more likely to use its administrative role in the international economy to prevent the rise of alternative centers of power, so effectively weaponizing all dependence on the United States.
So you have all these countries in other areas of the United States, be it Russia, China, but also friends or allies, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf states, they all want to find alternatives. But what are we talking about then? What are the main alternatives?
Is it only, because I’ve spoken to some who argue, you know, BRICS, they wouldn’t be able to come up with a common currency, they would have to do something else. The tech center, if you have new centers of technology, it wouldn’t be centralized in the same way around one country as it was in the past. But again, all of this, is BRICS the main institution to push forward a new economic architecture, or if so, what would it actually look like?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there is no alternative except a revolution, but we’re not in a pre-revolutionary situation.
So what do you do if, when you say is there an alternative, you mean an alternative to revolution, but if what’s called for is a structural change, we’ve, ever since 1945, as I said, there’s been a steady buildup and it cannot be sustained.
What do you do if economies are on the wrong track? How do you change track, especially if you have the vested interests controlling the electoral system so much that they really block any kind of third party from the duopoly that’s developed? How do you solve the political problem that is protecting the economic quandary?
Nobody’s been able to solve that problem short of a revolution, and yet it’s not, people aren’t ready for it. They’re blaming themselves. We’re going to blame the victim, blame the debtors for being impatient, for over-consuming, for not saving enough, while not giving them an opportunity to have a job that enables them to pay the cost of living and build up the savings.
The alternative that the Democrats and Republicans are talking about, well, let’s stop social security. Let’s roll back social security and medical insurance and Medicare. Let’s roll back the social spending.
Well, that’s also going to happen in Europe. How can Europe, the Eurozone, as long as it’s subject to the 3% limit on the amount of a national budget deficit, how can it re-arm? As if Russia’s going to invade, this myth that somehow Russia wants to re-establish the old Soviet Union, where Russia couldn’t possibly afford to, even if it wanted to. There’s no recognition that Russia’s already said, let Europe go its own way. We’re turning east. You don’t want us? Well, we don’t want to go where we’re not that welcome. I think President Putin said those very words. They’re sort of leaving Europe alone. It’s left all by itself with nowhere to turn, either except the United States or to redo the whole geopolitical alignment.
And I don’t see, as long as you have American meddling in German and European political elections, as it does to promote US-oriented politicians, especially ruling through NATO or Brussels, you have too much blockage for a revolution. And you don’t have a popular consciousness that there is an alternative.
They’ve fallen for Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there is no alternative but you to suffer and be impoverished and the economy to polarize. There is no alternative. That’s how evolution works somehow. The rent-seekers and the 1% are the survival of the fittest. They’ve survived and you haven’t. Accept it.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: But at least in Britain, I mean, if we cut down further on the kind of welfare spending that you’re talking about in the United States, that would increase debt dependence. It would not reduce it because if people weren’t able to go, for example, to a health service which is state-owned, they would presumably have to pay. Even if they were paying insurance, they would have to pay in some way. And that is a form of rent in the end.
And if you know about the health service in Britain, which is in crisis by the way, deepening crisis, if you know about the various reorganizations it has had for decades, what they have done is that they have fragmented it and made it extremely susceptible to rent-seeking.
There are lots of things that happen within the health service today which previously the health service did itself, which are publicly funded in other words, but which now are contracted out to private contractors. And I think even people of conservative views are now becoming increasingly critical of this. But there is no sense that it can be changed. Changing it would be to break contracts, to infringe property rights, and of course that is conceptually impossible or so we are led to believe. So I mean an awful lot of that.
If we could just come back to the world system. I mean countries need to trade with each other though. Can one have a system of trade, say a BRICS system of trade, which does not ultimately degenerate into a system of trades, a rent-seeking system as well. By the way I don’t think that’s a reason for not trying, but I mean, you know, or trying to set up alternatives to the existing one. But people who we discuss things with, viewers, come back and always tell us well, you know, don’t assume that the BRICS, the Chinese, in the end will be any different from what we have now, because this is a kind of human law that eventually rent-seeking in some form will be re-established.
Is it possible conceptually to think of an alternative trade system that works but which is not vulnerable to sort of rent-seeking, which does not turn into another rent-seeking system like the one that we’ve seen develop since the Second World War?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well you’re absolutely right. What you’ve just said is what economists deny. Most international trade advantages are rent-seeking. But in the free trade theory, rent doesn’t appear. Everything is supposed to be costs without taking into account rent. It’s as if commodities exchanged on the basis of value, not rents.
Well, the interesting thing about what you’ve just said, Alex, is that the rent-seekers know what rent is, but the rent-payers don’t. They think it’s all value. They think that’s really part of the actual cost of production.
So the answer is that if the leaders of the creators of this new system, let’s say they’re China, Russia, Iran, if they realize that, well, in order for us to remain viable, we have to absorb the whole Eurasian region as an interdependent whole, that means that governments have to take the lead in saying, okay, we’re going to have to have everybody employed. We’re going to have to actually decide on what kind of government is going to subsidize what kind of production. So actually there is a mutual trade.
There were many plans for this way back in the 1950s as an alternative to the World Bank. Land reform, for instance. Land reform would have got rid of the many of the agricultural rents, but the World Bank would only lend toward food exports, not for domestic food independence, self-sufficiency. The idea is to make self-sufficiency on a region-wide basis, and this entails some sort of government agreement.
Obviously, if you have one country, such as China, saying we’re going to get all the gains for ourselves because we’ve got a head start because of our socialism, other countries wouldn’t join. And the United States could then say, well, join the US system instead.
So the alternative to the dollarized system and to the NATO system is you’ve got to create a system to get rid of economic rent, and the main way to get rid of that economic rent is by a rent tax. I mean, that’s what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, the Physiocrats, Marx, and the whole 19th century had an objective in this policy. The German industrial takeoff in the late 19th century had it.
Everybody thought that, well, the way to minimize rents is to put natural rent-seeking monopolies in the public domain, because if there’s rent-seeking, it’s an essential published service. It’s the need for such services that enables their owners to extract rent. But if these services are in the public sector, then we can provide their services at subsidized rates or even freely for education, medical care.
So there is a way of having countries that are doing the trade will mainly trade in industrial products that reflect the cost of production, not including rent, without some sort of government support like Keynes had proposed for the bancor way back in 1944, that if some countries are running consistent deficits, say, with China, then at a certain point, the buildup of financial claims of the gaining countries over the paying countries will be wiped out.
That was all proposed, and it could have been workable that way, and it’s the only way that you can maintain a mutuality of trade, but mutuality defined as no country falling into debt dependency on other countries that lead to the whole buildup of dependency and instability and polarization that you’re finding in the Western economies today.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, wouldn’t the emergence of a central, well, many poles of power create more incentives for reducing rents? Because I’m thinking, after the Second World War, obviously it was, you know, the United States were leading the main technologies, all the big businesses had merged in the US, it dominated the industry, it had a very privileged position in terms of, well, in terms of, its position in the World Bank, the IMF making the dollar the main international trading currency and reserve currency. But once you have this monopolistic position, it’s, you know, there’s some ability for rent-seeking in the international realm.
But if you have other centers of power, wouldn’t that create a system for reducing the rent in order to attract, well, the rest of the world, if you will?
MICHAEL HUDSON: In principle, yes. But what is a country? What is a society? It’s not simply a country moving in its general interest, because a society is all sorts of different classes together, the financial interest, the real estate interest, the labor interest, and certainly in the West, the rentier interests, the financial interest, the monopolies control the government. They’ve used all of the rents that they’ve got, all of the wealth that they’ve created, to privatize the election process and the political process. So the country is really run by the rent-seekers in the West.
China has let billionaires develop, and the same thing in Russia. Russia and China have let billionaires develop, but they can still say, well, you can make a given amount of money, but beyond this, you’re going to have to pay it back into the economy one way or another, either through taxes or just we’re going to take over. You’re just too big to become a separate power.
If you have a socialist government like China, or even Russia, and saying, our job today is not to let an oligarchy develop that will destabilize our economy. And I think that’s what Putin has said. We had an oligarchy under Yeltsin. We’re not going to let that happen again. That’s our policy. Same thing with China, saying that when you have President Xi saying houses are to live in, not to make a profit from or rent from, industries produce goods, not to create fortunes for an independent oligarchy, then you prevent a self-interested rent-seeking class from developing in the first place. And that has to be done by increasing the role of the public sector with a very clear economic analysis of what economic rent is, how to calculate it. And it’s not hard to calculate, certainly for real estate. It’s easy to look at a balance sheet and cost and income and expense statement and realize how to stabilize things. But you actually have an economic doctrine underlying this political realignment that you correctly say is the ideal. And it’s the ideal because it’s the only way of creating long-term stability.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, I was wondering what advice you would have for Europe, because obviously Europe can’t develop the same strategic autonomy as the US or China. And I think in this situation, Europe has made itself extra vulnerable because in a conflict like this, the Europeans become even more dependent on the United States, having sent a lot of its arms to Ukraine as well, and having these now tensions with Russia. Europe is even more dependent on the US before, which allows the US to wield more influence in terms of asking the Europeans not just to cut themselves off Russian energy, but also now more pressure on cutting themselves off from the Chinese.
Now, if you don’t have strategic autonomy, the second best thing would be at least to diversify your partnership to make sure you don’t become excessively dependent on one state, such as the United States, as then, as you would say, it can take advantage of this. But at the moment, as Europe goes down this rabbit hole, we see now relations with China going from bad to worse. And the Europeans are just making themselves more and more dependent on the US. And obviously, the economy will continue to falter. But we have very little discussions about it. As I said before, it’s all ideology. It’s, well, we’re all democracies on the same side fighting for freedom. So none of this rivalry between the Europeans and Americans actually pop up in the discourse.
So I wanted to ask you, do you have any advice for the European economies how they should navigate themselves out of this? Because any goals of having parity with the United States is, yeah, long gone now, I think.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, who would have thought 10 years ago that it was the right wing parties that are advocating along the lines that you’ve just described, and that it’s the so called left wing parties, and ostensibly, the Green Party, the environmental parties, that are the war parties, and all for dependency against this kind of independence.
You do have Sarah Wagenknecht leaving the Linke Party to join with our alternative for Deutschland to create an alternative. But the response by the German government is, let’s ban these parties. These parties are opposing what we’re doing. So yes, of course, there’s a solution.
And it would somehow, the right wing parties that are trying to play the populist card and saying, Europe has to be economically independent of the United States. We can all get full employment again if we’re independent. But they can’t get independent without restoring the investment and trade opportunities with Russia, China, and Eurasia. But they’ve already cut them off.
And on what terms would Russia, China, Iran, and other countries accept Europe into the kind of BRICS plus set of institutions that they are trying to create? How can they trust Europe not to have a retrogression and a counterrevolution and be pulled back with yet another US-sponsored regime change in the European countries that’s going to block all of this? So there has to be a consciousness in Europe that they’ve lost control of their politics and that they have become essentially politically colonized by the United States via NATO and by the war spending.
Europeans would have to, number one, realize Russia has no economic advantage by invading us. It would have to bear all the costs of bailing us out. Russia’s going to instead say, you have to bail yourself out. We’re not going to pay for you. We did that after World War II. And many of the Russian western satellites live better than the Russians. They’re not going to do it again. So if Russia’s not going to invade Europe, you don’t need a military expense except for the Denmark solution back in the 60s. You have a telephone with an automatic answering service saying, we surrender. That’s all you need for your military expense. You free yourself from the military overhead.
You remake an economics curriculum that revives the concept of rent-seeking. This is not something that’s taught in neoliberal academic universities today, either in Europe or the United States, except in the business schools telling new business people how to extract more economic rent from the rest of the society.
So it’s a combination of re-education, of political realignment, and recognizing that the terms right and left no longer have any meaning for the financial sector. What we’re talking about economically goes beyond the 21st century’s idea of right and left and is much more like the 19th century’s concept of this. Europe has to rediscover the mid-19th century for this to happen.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: A very challenging thing for the Europeans to do. I mean, I speak for Britain, to some extent for Germany, which I know. In Britain, I think a very widespread sense of demoralization, a great sense of depression, a sense that options are being closed down, and you know, a sense that we don’t quite know what to do in a situation which is going downhill.
But the political system is still strong enough to prevent the kind of discussion that you are talking about.
I’m going to just finish on an optimistic note, which is I don’t think this is sustainable, actually. At least, I mean, in Britain, I don’t think it is. If you spend any time talking to people in Britain, I speak to lots of people in Britain, there is a great widespread sense that things have to change. It’s just that people don’t quite know how to change. And that’s actually a hopeful thing, because when people start thinking that things have to change, then they do start to say to themselves, well, let’s actually look for alternatives, alternatives which the current system is not providing.
So that’s, you know, I’m slightly more optimistic, but at the moment things look very bleak. I think in Germany, where this has come on much more suddenly, there’s still quite a distance from that point. And I think for the moment the political class there is very much in control, despite whatever Sarah Wagenknecht and the IFD are trying to do. This is my own view. Anyway, there we go. Those are my last thoughts.
Just one last thing to Michael Hudson. I know you’re interested in ancient history. I’ve always felt myself, as somebody who knows classical history, that the fall of the Roman Republic was principally a debt crisis. It was precisely the kind of debt crisis that we’ve been talking about: rent-seeking, getting out of control, causing enormous problems within Roman society.
And, of course, the classic book about the fall of the Republic, which we all used to read, by Ronald Syme, is entitled The Roman Revolution. So a kind of revolution did happen there. So, revolutions are not impossible.
MICHAEL HUDSON: So we’re both optimistic there’s going to be a revolution.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: Yeah. Yes. Yes.
MICHAEL HUDSON: There is a solution.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: There is a solution. There always is. I mean, human history isn’t going to end in a complete stop. It doesn’t happen like that. I mean, there might be all kinds of problems and bumps along the way, probably pretty horrible bumps, but things don’t just come to a stop. If something is unsustainable, it won’t be sustained.
The challenge is to make sure that when the change does come, it is not as chaotic and as dangerous as it might be. And the way to do that is to prepare in advance and to think through, understand what the problems are, and how to address those problems, and then what to do beyond the point where those problems have been reached.
GLENN DIESEN: I think what makes it so challenging to get out from is because economics is so deeply tied to the political. And for so many years now, since the end of the Cold War, we effectively re-divided Europe. We re-militarized the dividing lines in Europe. And the problem of doing this in Europe is eventually you would have a crisis, and then divided, militarized Europe would then become a chessboard, if you will, the object of great power politics, in which it would be severely weakened in this way.
So again, this is why I find it so frustrating, because if Europe really wanted to get out of this, we would seek immediately to negotiate an end to this war, so we would reduce the dependence on the US, allow us to diversify our economic connectivity to greater extent, and begin to restore something resembling to political autonomy. But there is none yet.
But again, I have some optimism as well that if we can just get this horrific war to an end, there might be some opportunities to rethink some of the policies and some of the wrong paths we’ve chosen.
Anyways, before we go, Michael Hudson, any last words, Professor?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, just to comment on what you just said, that there’s a new Cold War underway, and the United States has started it against China, and again, because it’s against China, it’s against Russia, and because it’s against Russia, it’s against Europe.
So there has to be a recognition that does Europe really want to be a part of this new Cold War, or does it want to have a different direction? That’s really what we’re talking about.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: Absolutely.
GLENN DIESEN: So yeah, thank you so much, Professor Hudson, for your time. Alexander?
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: Well, and thank you very much, Professor Hudson, for coming and giving us this very wonderful talk, very educational, extraordinarily interesting.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, thanks, Alex. Thank you.
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Old Vet
In the upcoming election in November, the Republicrat Party candidates are VCP #1 and VCP # 2,
VCP (Vile, corrupt politician) 1 and 2 are both for more of the same, i.e., screw the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and continue to do what works best for the filthy rich while stomping on the rights of “we the people” globally.
If you truly embrace your status as an American citizen, you will question everyone and everything all the time and will not allow VCP 1 and 2 to fill your head with lies. The revolutionary words in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are a guide to how we should interact with each other and the world and how we should treat a government that is, to say the least, “off the rails.”
Understand that “we the people” vastly outnumber the filthy rich. Also, veterans should remember that we all swore an oath “to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic” and that oath, plus the Declaration of Independence, clearly suggest what we must do now or forever hold our peace.
It is past time for an independent candidate, who believes in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, to challenge VCP 1 and 2 and the Republicrats. Could this actually happen? Yes!! With our advantage in numbers and a belief in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, we can accomplish the seemingly impossible.
The decline of the US began in the 1940s when the Tribe became our new ruling class. It continued in the 60s with legislation opening our borders to the Third World and discriminating against whites under the guise of civil rights.
Another disaster came with the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of embracing the new democratic Russia we pushed them around at the best of neocons, driving them into an alliance with China.
Americans don’t have it in them to fight domestic ((evil)). Salvation will come with a collapse forced upon the USA by external forces.
The western political class will have to be destroyed if the west is to have a viable future. The flotsam who gave us speech codes and shot down debate on all the key issues need to be discredited and then punished for what they’ve done. I’m not hopeful, and I believe the west will devolve into a bunch of banana republics with powerful oligarchs oppressing the masses. Getting rid of the Jews will be needed if western society is to regenerate. My guess is that it will not regenerate in the lifetimes of anyone currently living on earth. Might want to emigrate to Eurasia if they’ll have you.
The FINAL collapse of Amerika will come when the white people become a minority! The statistics say by 2044 this will happen! Then there will be a COLLAPSE of the …economy/currency, military, infrastructure (roads, electric power stations), Christianity, education, law & order….a new Dark Age…! Scary times ……
The US is doing none of these things and there’s no indication that they’re going to. The globalist financial crowd that own the US have no interest in it. They’re looters and asset strippers, and will loot and asset strip the country same as any corporation they can get their hands on.
So, following this line, the destination for the US is (more) poverty and unemployment.
Lee Kwan Yew (Prime Minister of Singapore) titled his book “From Third World to First”. We’re waiting for some future US author to title their book “From First World to Third”. And IMO the process is going to accelerate with the breakdown of the US Bond market.
So, since they can’t raise more taxes then they’ll simply print more money until it’s wastepaper.
These three gentlemen are so terrified of one malignant entity that their comments only serve to perpetuate the crisis that All of the West faces. The jew World Order which has declared war on all of Western Civilization and the white race that created it.
They have enslaved all the peoples of the West and thereby the rest of the world. Their primary weapon has been JEWSURY. This has resulted in our governments being chosen by Satan’s Chosen ones. All political parties are now led by treacherous Kikesucking goyboys and have been since the jew created their global system of central banksters and taxation.
Not only have they destroyed all of Western culture, morality, families and economies but have now launched their final assault on the West with an ever growing invasion army of non whites to disposess us of our lands.
We have become their slaves living in their technocratic totalitarian dystopian Kikeocracies. They are stripping us of all of our liberties, freedoms and property.
The only solution is to END JUSURY and the abominable reign of the jew.
Neo-Cons=Ex-Trotskyites who look at Putin’s Russia as Stalinist/ Tzarist Russia, which needs a regime change…ooops…er….I mean a “revolution”.
Blaise Pascal had some excellent advice that could have been tailor-made for the US: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
The US spends far too much on offence: looking for a fight all over the world. At least 750 bases in 80 or more countries. If you would bring them back to the states, they could defend your great nation against any attack. The vast saving and influx of skilled workers could rebuild America better.
I don’t mean literally sit in a room, but butt out of Asia, hand the Pacific Ocean to Freedom and Democracy, stop picking at the rest of the world, and have a nice day!
Excellent debate. Thanks to all three participants.
The hofjuden masonic old gang system has infiltrated, used, and because of its zionist supremacy has deformed and ultimately ruined the west.
It cannot be permitted to continue.
We need sit down with Rus China, talk cooperation and friendship.
It’s understandable that evonomists would say that, because they are, after all, economists. But they ignore the human factor. Too many people in the U.S. are not proficient or conscientious. And this is not limited to migrants or affirmative-action workers. Many traditional American workers have surrendered through a process shrinks called “mirroring.” And also because of the necessity to lower standards. I will add that this is not limited to industrialization. A recent study of skill and competence of medical staff ranked the US 27th internationally – – which correlates perfectly with the PISA educational rankings. My California leads the way in the above unraveling into “good enough.” (My middle-aged pool-equipment mechanic excepted. His first career was as a mechanic on a Navy ship. He treats me as if I were part of the crew on an aircraft carrier, depending upon him. Good luck duplicating that widely.)
Video Link
We have to remember that for 70 years, there have been thousands of ” shysters” working for the USG and the Globalist Banking System, introducing laws, rules, and every other type of ” fine print”, in order to make this Renters fiasco a reality. It was all done to loot the populations and they aren t finished yet. The “renter payees” don t even understand how it all works – because the USG doesn t want them to understand it. We were all sucker punched.
M.H.’s example of English King Edward III, plus his knowledge of “ancient” systems, show the necessity of being able to evaluate situations by comparison with historical precedent. This is vital since “there is nothing new under the sun”.
Systems like “monetarism” and other (usually Jewish) “common sense” supposed solutions from the Chicago School etc were used in 1990s Russia to devastating results, including mass loss of life. One cannot escape the possibility, even probability that they were designed for that purpose when we see ((who)) designed and administered them.
There are crucial lessons to be learned here.
One historic study that would imho prove most valuable is that relating to how National Socialist Germany went from being a basket case to having Europe’s top economy in just a few short years. One might also note that “Judea Declares War On Germany” in 1933 in an attempt to kill this prosperity at birth, the subsequent history, and draw inescapable conclusions from this. Conclusions that can be seen in today’s Gaza for example.
These three highly intelligent intellectuals go on at great length about US economic decline. But what is really going on here?
Imo, Bro Nathaniel sums up what is happening much more concisely. Allow me to summarize: Godless Jews have taken control of the US government. They have duped the stupid Americans into fighting for Israel. As a result, the US has become Zionism’s aircraft carrier in a bid for world domination.
Bro Nathaniel says this involves three steps: 1. dominate the world of money. 2. use the money to control the US government. 3. subvert the country’s Christian values by attacking Christianity.
It’s a simpler model but appears to explain what we are seeing. Will it succeed?
Three Stages of World Domination
https://www.realjewnews.com/?p=1995
If these western Neoliberal economists are so serious about economic freedoms then how come men like us aren’t allowed to have our own private money printing machines at home so that we could print the amount of money we need for our daily expenses from paying for groceries to buying a home or a mansion that she can approve?
Is this kind of talk or merely hinting at it even allowed nowadays – outside of Fed agent provocateurs of course??
Not to be a Debbie Downer but no radical change in government (revolution, regime change, etc.) occurs bottom up from within. Any historical narrative which says so is fiction. All radical changes in government, all revolutions, all regime changes are top down and come from without.
But collapse can and does come from within and things like open borders where you allow in millions of non-English-speaking migrants with retarded-level IQs who will be lifelong expensive dependents while your government goes into a trillion more dollars of debt every hundred days is a center which cannot hold.
The West’s great multicultural experiment will fail spectacularly when the wild-ass prosperity ends (think the dollar and the rise of BRICS). Then it’s apocalypse time.
They are quite mad.
I recall in 1970s getting parkas “Korean Made” – they climbed the value-added chain to LG and Samsung
Akio Morita started out post-WW2 making rice-cookers – refused to private label electronics – and SONY climbed the value-added chain
1920s Canon and Nikon imported technical know-how from Carl Zeiss to help Nikon make lenses and canon make cameras……….now Carl Zeiss is out of consumer optics
Anyone who thinks you can maintain slaves on a plantation overseas and lord it over them from your suburban American or European hacienda is demented………..
There are NO perpetual Annuities
Complacency is rife in Western society and that is the basis of laziness
This.
Yes. The JQ is everything.
Whites are already a minority in the USA. The official data is bogus because it counts millions of non-Europeans as “white” (MENA, Jews, octoroons, “white Latinx,” subcontinentals who “identify as white,” etc.) and also undercounts immigrants by millions.
It is always interesting to read what real Trotskyites think. Here’s something by the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/09/idtd-a09.html
Who the hell are these Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists? Obviously they are some marginal group with no influence, but still, they are far removed from the neo-con viewpoints and actions.
Or another interesting article by Trotskyites about Japan joining up with AUKUS in its warmongering plans against China.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/09/wdqy-a09.html
Do we always need to say “ex-Trotskyites” whenever mentioning neo-cons? That’d be like always writing “former Grand Wizard of the KKK” when mentioning David Duke. Would it add anything to the argument? Obviously the former is used to smear Trotskyites more often than the neo-cons, while the latter is used to disparage David Duke in his current incarnation.
“Well, China doesn’t have that problem, because China, the debts are owed to the government. The government can write down the debts to Evergrande and to real estate companies that can’t pay. And they don’t tear down the buildings, the buildings aren’t sold, everything goes ahead.”
But will they write them down? Or are they letting the bubble deflate while moving investment to green tech?
Video Link
If you listened to Michael Hudson in 2017 and bought a property in China you’d be sitting on something worth up to 30% less than you paid as millions of unbuilt and empty homes wait to be filled by a shrinking population. Empty buildings also age faster due to lack of maintenance – something the poor craftsmanship doesn’t need as it is.
“Same thing with China, saying that when you have President Xi saying houses are to live in, not to make a profit from or rent from, industries produce goods, not to create fortunes for an independent oligarchy, then you prevent a self-interested rent-seeking class from developing in the first place.”
President Xi is certainly trying, but he’s stuck in a hard place because people don’t want their real estate investments to drop – but the government already overbuilt and many people got rich quickly in the 2000s-2019.
Where I live you can drive around at night and see most housing areas have about 30-40% of the lights turned on – the rest seem totally vacant. Like Jack Ma said, you can’t build a house for yourself, your wife, each of your grandparents, and each of your kids and not expect a bubble. And yes, some people got filthy rich from that.
Meanwhile a lot of the lower class can only dream of buying a house due to low salaries and a lack of demand abroad for Chinese products from American led trade pressure.
This is natural in a finance-dominated economy that has successfully curtailed upward mobility and merit-based advancement because there is no incentive to do anything more than “good enough.” For laborers, being more productive just means that more of their wealth is extracted by the parasitic financial class. They don’t get promotions or a higher salary or anything for working harder, so they have determined (correctly) that hard work is for suckers. There is also the demographic problem, that the USA simply has a low quality population, due to several factors such as mass immigration and intentional attacks on the lower classes, so it cannot compete on a global level. The USA can only win when it rigs the game, and its ability to rig the game is coming to an end.
The US economy can re-industrialize very rapidly if surplus wealth is properly invested. However, under the current economic system, surplus capital will probably be consumed by rent-seeking and other forms of financial manipulation, and the West’s industrial decline will continue until nuclear war or the AI apocalypse.
“We also see economic dependence being weaponized, I would say… simply trying to cut off or cripple China’s access to technology.”
Nobody owes anything to China, especially, when the ungrateful bastards are biting the hands that feed it.
The Little Man Deng Xiaoping was a mental Giant who had advised his nation to learn from the West and wait about one hundred years to become the great power of the world naturally but the Big Man Xi Jinping is a mental Midget who has put his nation on the accelerated path of a faulty development which is going bring the inevitable death, demise and destruction to the feckless Chinese.
Confucius, Sun Tzu and Sun Yat Sen are all rolling in their ancestral graves …
I had a conversation with an economics professor while waiting in line at a computer repair shop during the early 2000’s. I had mentioned how off-shoring our manufacturing was a disaster. It was a random encounter, but he confessed to me that he “believed” the above, and had taught it to his students.
I explained, it only took a few seconds of self-inspection to notice that it was a flawed concept, that all populations exist as a gaussian distribution. Only a tiny fraction of any population can be the “Idea” creators. That the vast majority of people work in the trenches of industry; they are trading their labor value for money by making things. Is Shankikwa is going to invent i-phone technology in between birthing dozens of children with different baby daddies?
By the end of our conversation, he was bent over in shame – typical of smart people who got punked; smart people who did not bother to inspect shibboleths that pass for narratives. This happens constantly, for example during Covid, where supposedly smart doctors forgot basic immunology and fell for the mass formation psychosis narratives.
The actual reason jobs were off-shored was for wall street to take wage arbitrage. Debt free former communist Chinese labor beckoned, and this new labor pool could be harnessed to make goods. Finance Capital can fly anywhere in the world and labor is fungible (meaning it has feet and can move). This is the hubris of our (((friends))), as they wave and rub their hands, twisting reality.
Finance capital is international, and labor is fungible, ergo there should be no national borders. People don’t live in concentric rings of kinship, and only class matters, say our Moloch worshipping friends.
Atlanatacism (international finance capital) won in WW2, and is predicated on ships moving goods about, deep water navies are to enforce debt contracts, and finance capital centers such as London and Wall Street are to move their finance paper about. China physically has east coast ports for accepting raw materials by ship, and then exporting finished labor goods from self-same ports. The increment of production in wage arbitrage was to be taken by the finance masters in London and Wall Street. The delta in wages between Chinese labor and American labor was monetized as profits for wall street and London. Soon enough normies in America were asked to produce at the China price, never mind that the price was “gamed.”
Hudson is a classical economist, and classical economy has value and price theory, thus preventing him from being punked by false economic narratives, such as those promoted by neoliberals (mostly jews).
Normal humans live in radiating concentric rings of kin-ship. Any economic system that doesn’t deal with this reality is a non-starter, and against the natural order. Or, as Booker T. Washington said, cast down your bucket where you are; meaning Booker wanted new York Jewish Wall Street finance capital, to invest in America and not export jobs or import new labor. (New York Finance Jews instead created the NAACP, and weaponized negroes using Jewish lawfare.)
It was easy enough to transplant factories using green-mail techniques, such as those perfected by the Jew Carl Icahn. Another concept that was abused by our finance friends, is that invention is hard, manufacturing is easy. (Elon is blowing smoke up our ass – Elon is not an inventor.)
Giving away the fruits of your national inventors and industrialists, to then allow foreigners to work in their trenches of their industry is a “double raping” of your national population. The inventions and industry are the fruit of a tiny genius fraction of you country-men, and the other normie laboring people of your country are to enjoy that new productivity as fruit, as if through national kin relations. Normies need their neighbor smarter scientists and engineers to help said normies become more productive. Again, any national population is a distribution, where different peoples have different abilities, and to assume that the U.S. is to be only an idea center and finance center for the world, is the height of hubris. Only hubristic finance capitalists can think like that, and said FC’s also have usury money power to pass false narratives through their owned press organs.
Consider: If the semiconductor revolution had been contained to the U.S.,, and allowed to improve U.S. industrial production, this would have given the U.S. decades of leadership, and improved economics for Americans, through improved productivity. But, instead the invention and potential gains were offshored for some cheap labor arbitrage channeled to the finance class; and further, technological secrets, many won by regular workers as know-how, were given away to be monetized by others, especially Chinese.
Moloch is their god, the god of money, and they tell lies. To them they are not lies, because they are not part of the Logos. Mustache man was correct when he implemented national socialism to protect the German people from being raped. The U.S. is now a failed state because the parasite people, who promote failed ideology, have taken over and are killing the host.
Hudson normally focuses on the bronze age middle eastern barley cults, which he calls the near east.
Kind Edward, when he kicked out the Jews, permitted said Jews to take their gold and silver with them.
This then created a national crises as the money supply vanished. The magna carta also has language explaining how the usury Jews demands were to be handled.
Edward’s Talley stick system, and allowing credits/debts to cancel yearly, were actually an improvement over the 50 year Jubilee as required by the Bible. Jesus started his mission on the Jubilee year, to restart the Jubilee as the good news. (A creditor class Jew – Hillel had in previous centuries erased the Jubilee).
Think carefully: Talley sticks are sovereign money, cannot be counterfeited, and any debt relations among the population are inspected and erased yearly.
The balancing between creditors and debtors happened yearly at the great fairs, like Mayfair. The English in those days had as much as six months of vacation, as their daily bread was not stole out of their mouth by the creditor class.. The big cathedrals that took generations to build, were the product of volunteer labor. Nobody was coerced; they did it as a labor of love, volunteering their time mostly, because they were not debt slaves.
The word that cannot be spoken … Jews.
Hudson is probably the thought leader on how China was screwing up on their “property,” and creating a bubble.
I’m not going to bother with links, as this has been well known now for years. An easy way to think of it, is that the population was debt free, and this then led to a debt fueled credit boom, especially toward housing.
Housing and land is not fungible it is a fixed asset, fixed in place. With more money chasing after fixed assets, that causes price increases. The increases in money supply were done at debt. Hypothecation requires a double entry where both debt and new credit are created simultaneously. Putting debt free land on the banker’s ledger was enabled because the former communists never read part 3 of Marx, value and price theory. New credit channeled toward land and at debt.
Hudson even analyzed the mid tier of private banks that took bulk loans from the state banks, to then help fuel the property bubble. He has also given speeches at Peking University on how China can extricate themselves from their screw up. You don’t have to be Jewish to be greedy.
As others have noticed, the ledger can only be erased by legal means, and that requires public ownership of the money power.
March 26, 2023 Video: US-China Relations and the Contradictions of America’s Hegemonic Project The US and China: Putting the “Con” in “Conflict”
With reports emerging that China has signed on to Russia’s military coalition in Syria, at the same time that the Chinese are signing new cooperation agreements with the U.S., the question is once again being raised. What is the nature of China-U.S. rivalry?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-us-china-putting-con-conflict/5813492
Feb 3 , 2023 The Secret Speech of Chinese General Chi Haotian (2003)
Video Link
The USA lacks the human capital to actually be competitive in industry, so that investment would just be wasted. We can see that playing out right now with the effort to move TSMC chip fabrication to Arizona. Billions in subsidies, but they can’t find anyone to work there because Americans are too retarded. Even if/when they do, the Arizona production line will be inferior to those in Asia, so it will be a net drain for the company, only existing due to American political pressure.
No amount of investment will make the low quality American population into a high quality population (unless it was investment into eugenics or something).
Because the “representatives” in the West make it so?
I think there have been quite a few economists predicting a Chinese real estate market crash since even before Obama’s second term began.
My issue with Dr. Hudson is that he seems to imply that this bubble will get a bail out and Chinese house owners shouldn’t have anything to fear unlike Americans in 2008 where the housing market ended up nearly destroying the entire economy. You seem to have read him more than I, so if I’m mischaracterizing or misunderstanding you can send links and I’ll happily be corrected.
Here is an interview from 2018
https://www.unz.com/mhudson/us-vs-china-housingand-those-millennials/
Paul Sliker: I wanted to ask you specifically about the issue of debt in China. Their private debt bubble is basically the biggest in the history of capitalism. I think the 2017 numbers had it at about 220% of GDP. So what do you think is going to happen there with the broader economy?
Michael Hudson: Under current conditions nothing. It’s not a problem. Here’s why: The debts are owed to government banks. A government can do what the U.S. can’t do. The government can forgive debts, at least those that are owed to itself, without creating a political backlash. If a viable corporation has run up too much debt, the government can forgive it. This is better than letting the debt close down a factory or force it be sold to a predatory asset management firm as occurs in the United States. That is the advantage of having public credit and why credit should be public. That’s how it was in Babylonia. Rulers were able to cancel debts all the time in the 3rd millennium and 2nd millennium BC, because most debts were owed to the palace or the temples. Rulers were cancelling debts owed to themselves.
China can cancel business debt owed to itself. It can proclaim a clean slate. It can minimize debt service to whatever it chooses. But imagine if Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs are let in. It would be much harder for the government to raise real estate taxes leading to defaults on the banks. It could save the occupants by making new loans to those who default – based on lower land prices.
Why
?
Why not socialist central planners/”representatives”?
Does money have intrinsic value?
While the non-Western world prospers?
True. Pride in your craft, execution and perfection, striving for constant improvement. merit based promotion and job acquisition is buh-bye. “I can make a difference as an individual”, is a dead letter. More and more, collectivism, group identidy, Mass Formation (Mattias Desmet), is increasing.
This was actually foretold in many “science fiction” movies. Mass crowd controls, iniformity and diminution of the individual.
“The larger the government, the smaller the individual”. Bring back Hiter, so the nation and remain in a state of hynosis-feeling nothing except strict group conformity, low angst regression to a child-like state where Daddy is looked up to as Shirley Temple did in her movies. With her stern and sincere expression, and lower lip extended. “My Daddy is the (superlative fill in the blank).”
Need an example? Read Tiptoethruthetulips hero worship as a Deity.
Isn’t it the non-Jewish whites that aren’t spoken of, the Jews are mentioned all the time?
I noticed some time ago, that Russia, China, and Belarus never import labor for lowest jobs. Recently Russia will import some Kenyans for agricultural work on a seasonal basis. It is evident that a firm government that reflects the people’s will (and has an elite that is connected to the commonweal) produces the greatest long term results.
It seems that people of these nations are not too “proud” to do menial jobs. That is equivalent to saying that they are supremely practical and self reliant. They are none more resilient than Russians to varying and extreme conditions.
A Five Year Plan that worked?
There’s a reason they are importing invaders as fast as they can, it’s almost with a sense of urgency that they are bringing these people in, it’s no coincidence that it’s happening in multiple places at the same time. They’ll hand out automatic weapons to these people and militarize them and they’ll be used to put you down, and they’ll gladly do it for a paycheck, not like they give a shit, especially after being gassed up about how white people are evil.
Hudson always advocates for banks to be nationalized, and then the debt claim mortgages are analyzed. Then the property is written down; basically the creditor takes a hair-cut in debt release. During the savings and loan crises, the property in commercial real-estate was held by the government, until commercial land prices recovered. (And yes, it was principally Jews and their Goy agents who went along with the S and L rent scam.)
In this very article, Hudson talks about his theory on land rent, to then prevent housing bubbles and rent taking. See below in italics.
Xi is winding down the Evergrande bubble, and I haven’t been paying too much attention to the mechanics of it. If you allow housing to be too high priced to then function as rent service for Oligarchy, then young people will opt-out of the economy and “lay flat,” as is the case in China. They also choose not to reproduce, so how you handle the money is of civilizational consequences. If family formation is forbidden due to land rent taken in financial bubbles, then it forecloses on reproduction.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s exactly what’s happening. I wish they had turned over all of their housing to the occupants in 1991. I made three trips to the Duma urging that they adopt a land tax to prevent the privatization that had occurred.
Because even if you have oil and real estate privatized, you can collect the economic rents by a rent tax and basically make a profit and that’s it. Obviously this was not what the U.S. authorities wanted. And the Duma members who had brought me over had their elections fixed and were de-elected by the U.S. advisors.
China can cancel business debt owed to itself. It can proclaim a clean slate. It can minimize debt service to whatever it chooses.
When you do a clean slate, you look at the rent producing part of the debt claims. That part is erased. Some debts are legitimate. For example, after WW2, the NAZI debts were erased by the American conquerors, but those debts related to the functioning of the economy were left in place. Greece and others were not allowed to make claims on Germany, which then allowed German industrial take-off.
(Since I’m a national socialist, I don’t use the term Nazi as a pejorative, only as a acknowledgment of the reality that NSDAP lost in WW2. Hitler also released debts, especially to the farming class – as farmland had been transferring to the international creditor during the hyperinflation.)
Most of those posting here appear to be entirely ignorant of the history of the so called New World. I have in my book-stacks a book titled “The European Discovery of America.”
It is almost impossible to emphasize the importance of history. Few people know much more than their favourite historical touch tones. Historians’ too are fond of identifying some event in the past as seminal and so build around the event entire symphonies.
Economist frequently explain money as though there was no human agency creating the monumental edifice which they seldom refer to in their explanations. The talking heads will refer to the Fed raising interest rates or relate the latest Wall Street machinations as though the events themselves never have consequences beyond the transaction itself — or never explain how much of the events behind the headlines is a sophisticated scam.
The history of America barely cognizes the influence of the Jew in the earliest days of conquest. Money markets were already sophisticated in Europe long before the European discovery of a land barrier impeding the possibility of trade with China from the west being done without the hazards and costs of trading across Asia.
The Jew had been financing all manner of enterprises associated with international trade for Centuries before the Spanish conquistadors were rowed ashore onto the beaches of islands in the Caribbean Sea. Trading slaves across the Indian Ocean was old hat. Of course they knew the world was round.
Of course it is in the interests of sophisticated traders to keep secret the things they know and understand. Why would they broadcast their activities and advantages. Financing trans-Atlantic trade was not particularly remarkable and differed not in kind from common practices.
America had to be financed. Expeditions were enormously expensive. Returns to Spanish enterprise were staggering. Someone financed these expeditions. Aside all that gold destabilized every European institution. The consequences of all that sudden influx of capital upset the existing equilibrium — inflation ran rampant, prices rose; wars were easily financed; the hold the Catholic Church had on the minds of men was soon undermined; eventually revolution defenestrated the power of monarchy; and of course the financialization of the Global economy began in earnest.
By the end of the 17th Century England was completely transformed. The Jew recognized England was an easily protected platform from which to project their money power and understanding and after fomenting revolution there *persuaded* the compliant monarch to charter the Bank of England to manage Englands financial affairs.
Oliver Cromwell’s decision in 1656 to turn a blind eye to Jewish residence and immigration, meant that no special laws or privileges were ever enacted with regard to the legal position of Jews in England.
Eventually repercussions were felt in the 13 Colonies. Of course the Jew already controlled the economy in the New World. The revolution sought to disestablish the international financial power of the Jew by revolting. The Revolution succeeded in establishing the United States but the Jews never stopped doing everything in their power to prevent the revolution from occurring. …Including the War of 1812.
Andrew Jackson well understood the power of the Jew. He refused to recharter the Second Bank of the United States during his presidency. He was the president between 1829 and 1837. The affair resulted in the shutdown of the Bank and its replacement by state banks. He felt that the Bank put too much power in the hands of too few private citizens — power that could be used to the detriment of the government. Of course that proved to be an understatement!
There is a good argument for a central bank indeed a necessity; the argument has been buried under the justifying influence of the Jew. The Central Bank need not have been the Federal Reserve which most readers on Unz.com know is a private institution rather than one run by the Government of the United States.
The argument has been render arcane by those who find favour by their control. We know who *they* are! By definition the money Americans have in a bank is not theirs. It belongs to *those* who own the Federal Reserve. What sort of Government permits foreign ownership of their central bank?
The answer is Government of the people, by the Jew, for the Jew. It’s madness isn’t it?
Today we are witness along with the rest of the world the power of the Jew manifesting in Palestine — financed by the people of America, confiscated from Americans, by the Jew, for the Jew.
The book ought to have been called “The Jew discovery of America.”
They run America as private fief. You and I live in their fiefdom. But recall a fief is a loan from the people. In practice a fief was a loan from the king and the king could take it back. The American Revolution replaced the king with “We the People” …
“We the People” includes all the people of the United States of America. The importance of this phrase shows that it wasn’t just the framers of the Constitution or the legislators who were given powers to the government. Instead, the government gets all its powers from the Citizens of the United States of America.
It does not say Jews exclusively — or Jews or anyone else who claims dual citizenry.
The establishment of the Federal Reserve as a private bank was a coup. Citizens; take back your country. The United States of America is not a private fief!
The United States Constitution is clear enough.
Yes, OCH. That hidden hand!
The ring decoder is industrial capitalism vs finance capitalism.
The Colonials invented industrial capitalism, especially John Winthrop in Massachusets bay. Sovereign credit channels toward industry. Additional debt free money was issued (Massachusets Bills) to pay the positive interest on debt claims made between citizens.
The Chinese system is basically a copy of the American System of the founders, which is industrial capitalism. The Kaiser adopted the system, which is the main reason Germany was attacked in WW1.
Hudson says it in the very article. The main dividing line between civilizations are how you handle the money, debt, and taxes.
If you have private banks and stock market capital, and you barter and truck, then you are part of the West. The bartering and trucking of the merchant class was inserted into the west when the Jew parasites invented it while on sojourn in Amsterdam (after being kicked out of Spain in 1492).
It then jumped to London in what Archibald Ramsay called the Nameless War. The English were attacked in a hidden nameless war. Then it jumped to the U.S. by 1912 in a rigged election.
Privatizing the banks via the Federal Reserve helped fund the entry into WW1, to then kill off the threat presented by Industrial Capitalism and Sovereign Finance. Mussolini nationalized the banks in 1926.
Does money have intrinsic value?
No, that is a Jewish hoax, or perhaps they came to worship gold over the thousands of years they arbitraged it on the trade routes. It’s either a purposeful hoax, or it became genetic memory.
The Aiparu/Hebrew term means minor merchant in Egyptian language. The Egyptians also thought the Greeks had something wrong with them as they worshiped the intrinsic value of Gold. Yet, Greek thinkers like Aristotle came to understand that money was nomisa, a function of the law, and had no intrinsic value. It was like math, and invention of the mind.
The Egyptian money was demurrage, it was clay shards that decreased in value as the mice and rats ate the grain stores. It was hard for a creditor class to emerge, making claims against nature, forcing nature to grow exponentially to make their claims good. The money itself kept declining. The temple priests would scratch marks on the clay shards about how much family grain was in storage.
Doesn’t this effectively mean that economic theory that US has been propagating was false? If PRC can find resources to support industry and effectively subsidize the world economy, why cant the US? It only emphasizes that US economic orthodoxy has been wrong and now is the time for reckoning.
The problem with economists and central bankers like Nebulina is that they are so consumed by their quantificational, actuarial and statistical models of economics that they are can even accept reality when it doesnt conform to their models. These models are junk. The sanctions simply killed the incentives for wealth to be siphoned off. So all the off book wealth is finding is way back to the country or simply stopped being stolen because there are no venues for placing it. It is stimulus to the tune of hundreds of billion.
Varoufakis conceptualization of cloud capitalism is very refined theoretical lens to understand where the future of wars lie. Data truly is the new oil.
That really is the crux of the matter. The old institutions based on financial, investment and technological colonialism have to end. Simple as that. Same tools will eventually lead the world to same results. The constraints to growth mainly are capital and technology. They have been weaponized to gain equity ownership of most profitable assets of the developing world. This system has to end. The center periphery conceptualization of human collective essentially has a tacit assumption: Some human beings are superior to others (Rationalizations can be as varied as knowledge, technology, capital or morality). It is as simple as this.
By conceptualizing rent as price over cost, how can rent be taxed? I mean what incentive there would be for private owner of the asset? I mean, ideally the theory says that private enterprise collects as rents what it saves through it efficiency? How can it be quantified. More explanation of this would have been great.
This alternative that the duopoly is talking about of basically scuttling the last vestiges that binds the precarious chaotic equilibrium in balance would lead into the revolutionary situation. Revolutionary situations arise of inability to respond to most pressing social demands.
Hilarious. But quite true actually. Simply to use the template from 100 hundred years ago is simply irrelevant. Russia postponed the Ukraine conflict for good many 8 years and even then tried to get Ukraine to a negotiated settlement. On simple military calculus, it does not make any sense in Russia trying to take over Europe. I mean what for? What resource or technological or geographic superiority it would confer to Russia? And secondly, why would Russia sacrifice millions of people for what gains by its foray into Europe? What historic discourses and legitimization it would use for convincing its people? It is so non nonsensical that its almost comic.
You may be right about our inability or unwillingness to attempt to change our direction, but I sincerely hope there may be a way out. I, too, am an old vet, and I’ve been looking at a new movement that just might provide a glimmer of hope: https://folkpotpourri.com/now-is-the-time/ Check it out – maybe enough of us can join up to make a difference.
Democracy means more freedom for US to meddle in other countries.
It’s really Hegemocracy.
So-called ‘liberals’ should really be called Stengelites.
Video Link
There’s a huge amount of flak (origin FLugAbwehrKanone // trans AntiAircraft Guns) coming up on this column as the Usual Suspects’ position is increasingly weighed in the balance and found to be wanting (to put it very mildly).
Also in the “news” wherein the proles are informed about China’s imminent collapse, Russia again abt to run out of ammo, Iran gun-running to terrorists in Jordan and developing an A bomb, an anti-Hezbollah faction has been activated in Lebanon .. the CIA as ISIS has threatened to blow up four European football stadiums … many stops being pulled out in view of the legal (and military) pressure presently on Israel, with the strong possibility of much more to come.
But JFYI here’s a legal development ref Crocus City attack.
This might turn out interesting …
Wholeheartedly share your sentiment and agree that we should demand closure of a good 700 of the US empire’s 750-800 military bases abroad.
However, I’m not sure that the returning soldiers generally have such a high level of marketable skills from their time as thugs in uniform. Some can work as airline or helicopter pilots, or as mechanics maintaining and repairing aircraft, commercial ships, and land vehicles in the USA or abroad. But that seems to describe only a small minority of the US Army and Navy “personnel” who are currently stationed abroad.
Those with marketable IT skills might do fine back home as well (although they’ll have to compete with the neverending flood of H1Bs from India, China and elsewhere in those fields).
Others will go on to receive preferential treatment to be hired as cops — where many of them will view us as they were trained to view the peoples whose countries they occupied, and talk to and treat us like garbage.
Other than the fields mentioned, what exactly will the majority of returning midwit killers and time-passers in the US military DO productively at home? Very few of them come from farm / ranch families anymore, and most were no great shakes academically.
Perhaps some of the soldiers returning from hundreds of closed bases could be stationed on our land borders, with orders to shoot illegal entrants.
It’s not just low-IQ migrants but also millions of STEM Panjeets to prop up the rent-seeking government-contracting industrial complex.
Canada has big problems.
A money supply created by a private organization is simply skimming profits off the top. It’s like driving with the brakes on. Somewhere is a loss of power whose source is not readily apparent.
Private central banks spend money into existence, when the freshly created money has maximum purchasing power. Yet the value of the fresh money diminishes with each subsequent transaction. Inflation is a hidden tax that is collected at the source, before anyone realizes that it is being paid.
Money’s loss of value and the corresponding price increases are included in all costs within the economy. For every hour that someone works, something like twenty minutes of our time and labor are being siphoned off by the Federal Reserve, so we are really only being paid for forty minutes
This exchange distills things down:
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS:
Because I was reading actually, again, there’s been a very interesting statement by the governor of the Russian central bank, Nebulina, who is, by the way, somebody who I think personally, emotionally, was very wedded to the neoliberal, open market, unregulated economic model. She is absolutely astonished at what the effect, the actual effect of the push to a kind of enforced protectionism in Russia has been. And in this statement she says that what’s actually happening, and she says, I can’t explain it, this is astonishing to me, is that investment is rising. Consumer spending is rising. Wages are rising. And in conditions of an investment boom, production is expanding. She says, you know, I don’t quite believe this. I worry that the economy, our Russian economy, is growing faster than capacity, that it’s going to burn itself out in some way.
Hudson:
Well, economists love to use the word self-correcting, because if economies are self-correcting, you don’t need a government. You can just have the private sector running the economy. And in practice, that means Wall Street.
____________________________
The Jewish finance capitalist system we have today was invented by 700 unlicensed Sephardics who had infested the Dutch Stock Exchange. They invented Get/Puts forward contracts. New Company towns were invented, which over-turned sovereignty, as the townspeople became corporate citizens. The upper house democracy was invented to get debtors a vote in their debt status. The Dutch Indies company basically did what the Aiparu did for thousands of years, go to India to get gold and spices, and then arbitrage the metals/spices over the new shipping routes rather than over-land.
This is why finance capitalism developed in Holland, and it was Jewish, and then it infested/parasitized the West through the Nameless war. All of the finance centers are over-run with non-white peoples, because the gestalt of FC is that all peoples are fungible, and simply replaceable work units to service debts.
The above exchange about Elvira Nabiullina is about her ne0-liberal Atlantacist brainwashing. Brainwashing begins the first day of Economics School as has been explained by Steve Keen, in his book, Debunking Economics. She absolutely cannot fathom what is happening because she doesn’t have the intellectual gravitas to overcome her early life narrative programming. A lot of Russians hate her, and there are better choices such as Sergei Glazyev.
Putin has allowed fifth column Atlantacist to remain in power, because Putin is also clueless in many ways. Allowing Muslims to build ethnic enclaves in Rus areas is not statesmanship. Keeping Elvira at the bank is not statesmanship. Putin would not be successful at steering the economy toward sovereign money and autarky on his own, as he also was brainwashed like Elvira.
David Eastman, another economist, explained how he was offered “free textbooks” for his beginning economic students, and of course the textbooks were funded by usury out of the finance capital class. Eastman taught American Social Credit, which is a threat to finance capitalists. The textbooks were ‘standard” ne0-liberal orthodoxy that took Keen years to disabuse himself of.
Well, economists love to use the word self-correcting, because if economies are self-correcting, you don’t need a government. You can just have the private sector running the economy. And in practice, that means Wall Street.
Hudson is exactly right, as usual (not always). This idea that there is some sort of magick self balancing in the world, is narratives for normies. It is propaganda promulgated by the creidtor class, and if you pull the red thread, you always find jews. It is demonstrably false, yet many people suck it up as if it is a guiding principle, like gravity. It actually takes a dictator to put his foot in the ass of rent seekers. Something like how Jack Ma got the boot in his ass for attempting a finance takeover using fin-tech.
The whole idea that manufacturing will be outsourced to China while the West will keep the precious name brands like Nike or Apple and collect gratuities from the use of the name was simply loony from the very beginning
Another loony idea and a symbol of decadence was that we live in an information age where manufacturing is fit for ignorant peasant countries while the West prestigiously trades in information and establishes social media sites as giant, over-capitalized entities.
It is fascinating, given the inherent stupidity of the above, that almost no intellectual, politician or economist ever pointed the basic flaws in this model. I guess they were too busy getting kickbacks from the people who became incredibly wealthy under this model.
A more decadent society than the late-stage West cannot be imagined.
Thanks for the exposition (for me) and edifying essay. Russia has a Central Bank, as part of the Russian Government. It is run by a woman, a Tatar, who is a financial genius and very gifted all around. Whatever the structure of that institution and the inter-relationships, it seems to work quite well, in real time, with no cutesy games.
https://www.cbr.ru/eng/press/event/?id=17292
I’m a Russia watcher. I seek and consume a fair amount of material regrading all aspects of Russia, in order to understand it. I had a head start. My first visit to Russia was in 1977. I have know many Russians and Ukrainians through my Orthodox Faith.
Today’s Russia is very different than the overall geist of the Soviet Union; all the cliches, generalizations, etc. Russians are a unique people. Overall, they are superior to any other nationality of the West. They display technical, scientific expertise, innovation, invention, and advanced work products that only innately talented and disciplined people can produce. They seem distant as strangers, but that is not at all who they are. They are as warm and emotionally healthy as Italians and Greeks, The Levant, etc.
Chew on this: Russians are a hybrid between East and West, that has produced a unique, durable, profound and “industrial strength” nation and people. Fortunately, I discovered that I have Slavic and some small amount of Russian DNA.
These are the useful idiot types who really believe in the ideology.
Neo-cons are the ones who left Trotskyism, many of them are Jewish and Neo-conservatism emerged mostly as a perceived threat to Israel after the fall of Apartheid South Africa. There are many similarities in between both the groups, both are international in their mentality, all the Neo-con Trotskyites did was change from, spreading “revolution” around the World to, spreading “democracy” around the World. They are called Neo-Cons or New Conservatives because they became Conservatives later, taking power of the mainstream Right from the Paleo-Cons or the old Conservatives. For many Jewish types, Marxism or Capitalism does not matter, what matters is interests of the tribe, whichever ideology helps the tribe.
Before the ink was dry on the Constitution the European bankers began to plot against the what was then a novel idea — that government “…of the people, by the people, for the people” — was antithetical to their power.
In Europe the Jew gradually promulgated one revolution after another, against the monarchies. What happened?Seldom is it explained that someone had financed the expeditions to the New World; the someones wanted their returns on these investments.
The King and Queen may lend their approval but ships had to be paid for; wealth and power and position is a liability — in fact a cost! Monarchs can only maintain their power, prestige, and influence by a careful husbanding of their resources. The tax payers have a limited ability to pay. Working the peasants to death implies negative returns. Loyalties are bought and are expensive to maintain.
The monarchies had debts to pay. Treasuries need replenishing. There is always the temptation to ease the burden by promulgating a war against an adversary more prudent in their expenditures — whose treasures in fact may not be as full as they appear. Appearances are important to maintain.
Wars are not always decisive in deciding who won. As often as not the winners lose. There is always those pesky debts. Winners and losers are forced to borrow. Piles of gold in the losers treasuries — is as a rule pledged against their debts. The same forces prevail among peers.
By 1475 economies in Europe were stagnant. Plagues reduced the populations. Tax receipts fell. Etc.
But suddenly Spain was awash in gold. Gold though fungible is not uniformly liquid. There are no returns on illiquid commodities. They store spending power, but like any commodity, suddenly available their prices drop. But the things people want to buy rise in price. Spain, after all the gold from the New World worked its way through Spain’s economy suffered a stagflation.
When gold began to accumulate in vaults, the holders of it realized their gold was depreciating — its purchasing power was diminishing. What to do? Lend it! The lenders encouraged the borrowers to borrow. Various monarchs to their surprise suddenly had lots of credit available with which to war against their neighbouring monarchies. And war they did.
Seldom is it explained that someone had financed the expeditions to the New World; the someones wanted their returns on these investments. The King and Queen may lend their approval but ships had to be paid for; wealth and power and position is a liability — in fact a cost!
Neither is it explained that the real effect of too much money is not a good thing. The only people who had experience with money and lending was the Jew. He was constrained by a golds limitations.
But suddenly the Jew was busy. Governments are most certainly the place to lend lots of money. And wars are nothing if not costly. Adversaries girding for war borrow and borrow. Costs are almost impossible to control. And it is much easier to encourage big borrowers to pay back with interest those enormous loans. If the big borrowers do not pay it back there are penalties. Note least cutting of their credit.
Here is where understanding cash flow is so important. Few activities as a rule are not constrained by circumstances which bear on everyone. Businesses are not cash cows unless they have access to lots of access to cash. Borrowing encourages corporate concentration. At some point (not as theoretical as might be assumed) economies stagnate. Monopolies can and do simply raise prices. Privately controlled central banks see to it that their friends have access to credit while credit becomes more expensive and eventually unobtainable for more and more people.
Profits are rarely as high as it assumed. But financialized economies are profitable for some sorts of enterprises — in the short term.
Because a financialized economy is looting. Governments are complicit because gains from financialization have costs too. So bribing governments to encourage financialization is a cost of doing business. However a financialized economy is a Ponzi scheme. Financializing an economy involves bribing. Politicians are bribed. Politicians bribe the public servants. Bribes pervert the courts. Activities once deemed illegal are gradually made legal. Accountability simply disappears. And of course taxes rise — on those made least capable of paying them. The Government becomes complicit in looting the people. Jobs disappear. …Especially at the margins. Capital flies elsewhere steered to jurisdictions where profits are assured. …And bribery and corruption prevail.
The public in the United States gradually relinquished their economy to people whose loyalties are to themselves. They run the economy and rule as though they are entitled to do so.
They perverts the language. For example, claiming the Constitution is a living tree. Hah! Thus the tree is pruned and made amenable to the fraud that the Constitution no longer serves its purposes. The pruners mean the Constitution as conceived does not serve those who would prune it.
Still the Constitution holds that government is a government “…of the people, for the people, by the people.”
“We the People of the United States” are the source of the governments legitimacy.
If the country is invaded the Constitution provides the means to defend The United States from subversion and foreign aggressors.
Section 4 provides for the removal of the president and other federal officers. The president is removed on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other crimes and misdemeanors.
All Americans ought to familiarize themselves with the Constitution and its articles. Not a few of them have been abrogated.
My recommendation is people ought to form voluntary circles and familiarize themselves with its original intent and its privileges and responsibilities. The people should realize the Constitution privileges the People not the oligarchy.
Thank you Ron Unz for providing a means of countervailing the debasing of these United States.
My most recent comment attracted a message that said it was spam. How so? What was it I wrote that offended the adjudicators whomever or whatever made the decision; pray tell?
Good comment! But how and why should it have of come to this? We are good people, who mind our own business, but the Globalists just don’t like us..
I think you must have been responding to someone else’s post. I did not refer to Russia.
Everything you say sounds good but the Jewish ruling class that controls America wants an aggressive foreign policy to protect Israel.
Are you clueless? Here it is again:
And in this statement she says that what’s actually happening, and she says, I can’t explain it, this is astonishing to me, is that investment is rising. Consumer spending is rising. Wages are rising. And in conditions of an investment boom, production is expanding. She says, you know, I don’t quite believe this. I worry that the economy, our Russian economy, is growing faster than capacity, that it’s going to burn itself out in some way.
Nabiullina is an idiot. Women in high power positions is almost always a bad thing. Every now and then you get a unicorn, but on average they are below average.
Goebbels sent women home to the home-life, they were removed from the money economy, and returned to the gift economy.
You don’t know the structure, clueless.
Hudson has laid it out pretty clearly, but you weren’t paying attention. It was the west via the sanctions that forced Russia’s hands. The sanctions were a gift, and worked like tariffs, forcing the Russians into Autarky. Putin would never have had the political capital, nor in my estimation the the knowledge, to steer Russia on the path it is on now. It was forced, as a gift, and people like Nabiullina still cannot understand economic reality. The state department neo-conned Jews overplayed their hand in Russia, as they think in a brainwashed way, they are high on their own supply.
You also can watch Putin in real time “de nazifying” Ukraine, and very little mention is given of the fact that Ukraine is run by Jews in service to international finance capital. The supposed Ukro Nazis are actually Kosher Nazis, playing their part as dupes. When it is all done, if Putin is not careful, Ukraine lands will be transferred to Black Rock and Goldman Sachs, and the former Pale of Settlement Khazars will still be using Ukraine as a launching pad for attacking Russia.
Putin also allows the Tuvan, Shoigu to run a grifting game for his ethnic in-group. The real reason Yevgeny Prigozhin of Wagner marched on Russia, was because of Shoigu.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/6/shoigu-who-is-the-russian-defence-chief-detested-by-wagner
From the above link:
He (Shoigu) simply epitomised the operational logic of Russia’s governing structures and military machine, which are mired in corruption and fake reporting, observers said.
Russia has its problems, and a big one is keeping incompetent people like Nabiullina and Shoigu in power. The other is their own fake narratives, similar to those promulgated in the West. Fake claims about De-Nazification and glorifying the “great war” is not telling the Truth. The Truth is, that Russia was infested by Bolshevik non-Russians during the great war, especially Jews – who took over her brain, and made her (Russia) do things against her interests. The 90’s was the exact same gambit, where Russia was infiltrated by foreign Oligarchs, who bought up the commanding heights of Russia’s economy. The almost collapse in the 90’s was completely avoidable. China played the game much smarter.
A long article that can be summed up with one sentence.
The jews who control our central banks have to be removed.
HE said it, not I. Soros Empire.
Many returning US military faggots will kill themselves, which is the most productive thing a US military faggot can do.
Belarus may be, but Russian Federation is known for importing migrant workers from the ‘Stans. Especially into the richest cities like Moscow and St. Petersborough where street sweepers were all central-asians, and building contractors from the Ukrnia and Moldovia.
And, richer westernized Muscovite Jews until recently would enjoy hiring Pinay caregivers and nannies.
Actually even USSR had to import Vietnamese to work on her auto assembly lines.
Made good sense until the gibberish about not being part of a nonexistent unexplainable notion called “the logos.”
https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/logos-ethos-pathos/
Logos appeals to the audience’s reason, building up logical arguments. Ethos appeals to the speaker’s status or authority, making the audience more likely to trust them. Pathos appeals to the emotions, trying to make the audience feel angry or sympathetic, for example.
Collectively, these three appeals are sometimes called the rhetorical triangle. They are central to rhetorical analysis, though a piece of rhetoric might not necessarily use all of them.
And:
https://www.logos.com/grow/bsm-why-did-john-call-jesus-the-logos/
English did not capture the meaning of Logos from the Greek, hence your confusion:
Logos in Greek means, most literally, “word.” But as with countless words in all languages, logos picked up other senses. Logos could also be used in a more metaphorical way. The famous mathematician Pythagoras named logos as the law that made math work. Philosophers Heraclitus and Aristotle, along with Hellenist and Stoic groups, generally viewed the logos as the divine principle that created and sustained the world.
Materialists, such as Jews are not part of the logos. It’s non trivial, as clown world requires materialism and lack of spirit.
You are correct. This importation of temporary labor is quite different than the default absorption for purposes of Great Ethnic Replacement. Russia’s army has swelled this year to close to 2 million, not including reserves. That is a lot of workers removed from the labor force. About 25 factories open a month in Russia, most are not defense or military related, but in order to effect “Import Substitution”.
Russia strives for total independence in all manner of goods. At this time the country is over 90% reliant on domestic sources; and that is increasing.
Russia has now advanced several programs to expand the Russian Orthodox, “Russian Soul” culture and peoples that connect to its traditional values, culture, and uniqueness. It is not interested in external culture enrichment, “diversity”, and other Western diseases.
Singapore middle and upper classes, import Filipino maids who live in and act as nannies, cooks, maids, et al. They sign a contract.
Thanks for expanding the topic.
Although there are lots of good decent people in these United States we are not in control of this country or our governmental leaders.
Capitalist extortion and exploitation is all the west knows how to do. We kill people for a living. We are the agents of Satan and the rest of humanity wants to get away from us and our addictions, perversions, and worship of money!
They have logic and sanity while we shun everything that is not profitable.
BRICS is humanities future; if the earth is not blown up.
which brings us back full circle to the Sephardic Amsterdam community, that booted out Spinoza.
Spot on, and lest we forget just as Remus and Romulous sucked at the wolf’s teat so Putin sucked the chabad whore of Babylon’s teat and does nothing against his masters or their appointed Turk Tatar cousins… fuck Putin!
I think you are really a smart guy, who quotes other economists, summarizes history, and could be as useful as John Maynard Keynes. You speak with such authority over such senior figures who have indelible records that measures their performance. The Russian economy is one of the healthiest in the world, increasingly diversified, wages outpace inflation, and growth is solidly based on real production, not deficits. The Russian military industrial complex produces more materiel than all of NATO. Shoigu and Nabuliuma of course were only spectators.
They look like solid performers, while you are……???? Have you accomplished anything, lead anybody, overcome adversity, been challenged by more than cold butter on toast? Who knows if the esoterica you blurt is valid or not? Who cares? Certainly not me. Heil Hitlist!!
Short summation of Russian economic performance:
Video Link
Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina
(Russian: Эльвира Сахипзадовна Набиуллина; Tatar: Эльвира Сәхипзадә кызы Нәбиуллина, romanized: Elvira Säxipzadä qızı Näbiullina; Bashkir: Эльвира Сәхипзада ҡыҙы Нәбиуллина; born 29 October 1963) is a Russian economist and current head of the Central Bank of Russia. She was president Vladimir Putin’s economic adviser from May 2012 to June 2013 after serving as the minister of economic development from September 2007 to May 2012.[1][2] As of 2019, she was listed as the 53rd most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.[3] She has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.[4]
Succeeding Sergey Ignatyev in 2013, Nabiullina was appointed head of the Central Bank of Russia, becoming the second woman after Tatiana Paramonova[a] to hold that position, and thus the first Russian woman in the G8.[17] In May 2014 she was named one of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes, which noted that she “has been given the difficult task of managing the ruble exchange rate during Russian military operation in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea and facilitating growth for an economy trying to avoid a recession”.[17] In an effort to stop the ruble’s slide, the Central Bank of Russia, under her leadership, hiked interest rates, free-floated the exchange rate, and kept a cap on inflation,[18] thus stabilizing the financial system and boosting foreign-investor confidence.[19] Euromoney magazine named her their 2015 Central Bank Governor of the Year.[20]
In 2017, the British magazine The Banker chose Nabiullina as “Central Banker of the Year, Europe”.[21]
BTW, Thelma, have you made Aliya to Eretz Israel yet?
It would only serve to disparage him from the perspective of one ignorant of the KKK’s devotion to Western Civilization.
Does David Duke profess to be ‘reincarnated’ since his KKK days?
The World Russian People’s council is making new policy documents for Russia.
https://www.unz.com/article/massive-us-biowar-funding-created-biowar-vax-industrial-complex-threatens-to-swallow-the-west/#comment-6504166
It is the Stolypin group and Sergei Glazyev who are the actual brains in Russian economic circles, not Nabiullina. There are plenty of people within Russia who are confused by the presence of both Shoigu and Nabiullina.
Good try on the lowbrow comment about Keynes. He said that if the WW2 stimulus in America overcame the great depression, then his economic theories would be vindicated. He was right.
I’ve already accused you of being a mid-wit in the past, and my opinion has not changed. Poop-on
I don’t quite go so far. Putin will be a historical loser if he doesn’t create a Tsar system. There has to be a new Tsar along with a symphony of Church and State. The church acts as a moral brake.
Hungary had a constitutional kingdom that lasted nearly 1000 years. They did not have idiot kings that promoted their idiot sons onto the throne.
Putin is allowing third world Muslim hoards into former Rus lands, a historic mistake on his part. You take the good with the bad, but I cannot forgive his altering the demographic destiny of the Rus people.
The ” west ” only sits down with people that they can hold a gun to their head and dictate what they had better do.
Xi sits down with people and gives them respect and honors their humanity. BRICS is win win for everybody. The west is me me me, disrespect, threats, extortion and murder.
A lot of the above is hogwash, just rehash history and excerpts from academics and intellectuals, which I presume you aspire to be. Sounding like you know how to run an economy outside of clichés from books and colloquium would unwind you, like a cat pawing a roll of toilet paper.
In the real world, son, where events overtake you, normalcy and predictability are lost, road markers are obscured, composite knowledge and EXPERIENCE are what you gird your loins with and respond to exigencies in real time. This is something you will never do, being the blabbing type, and just another debater.
I am sure Nabuilina is far from an ideology led by the nose type, or classical this or that, or any other derivative therefrom. Unlike you who references everything hinter wards from the past or some doyen of the Dark Arts and Farts of Econonics.
In fact, Russian in leadership positions seem to have eschewed idiotological road signs and rather evaluated and responded based on thought and analysis. I consider people who have to reflexively reference “Schools of Thought”, as rather inferior and insecure.
I doubt you would go far or thrive within Russia’s intellectual class. You seem like a glorified clerk.
Generally agree with your comment. However, i think Trotskyists conversion to neoconservationism started with Arab Israel war of 1967 and how global alliances were structured then and not with apartheid South Africa. Also, i agree that they transposed some elements of Trotskist ideology to the new camp of convenience. However, this does not mean that all people were like that.
An excellent conversation and analysis of the dilemma facing western economies, my only reservation is that there is not quite enough emphasis upon the urgency of the situation.
Hudson allows that the situation has not yet acquired a pre-revolutionary momentum, perhaps pacing The French Revolution, but unquestionably, inevitably, these crises are resolved with force, and if not insurrection, then war. It’s worth remembering that the last great re-set of global finance was made in 1945 – following a very big and destructive war. War – to paraphrase someone – can be thought of as business pursued by more competitive means. It’s worth also noting that the world is currently witnessing two extremely reckless wars – one in Palestine the other in Ukraine. I suspect that one or both of these will have a bigger say in a global re-set for economies than any internal or ‘sovereign’ politics.
Poop on. Midwittery is real!
https://twitter.com/NoahCarl90/status/1777373334134517802/photo/1
This very UNZ discussion thread talks about logical arguments, and you are now telling us the people like Hudson are hogwashes, doing rehashes of history, and that I am a glorified clerk. That is you, a midwit, trying to place yourself above as an authority, using Ethos. Only your ability to reason can stand scrutiny. Non midwits, such as Hudson (who demonstrably has a very high IQ) have the ability to learn and incorporate new knowledge – to adjust to new information and/or discover new truths.
Logos appeals to the audience’s reason, building up logical arguments. Ethos appeals to the speaker’s status or authority, making the audience more likely to trust them. Pathos appeals to the emotions, trying to make the audience feel angry or sympathetic, for example.
Right, Spanky. Pot shots from behind, far away from the action. Put together some mish mash that sounds good from e-con-o-mediocre.. “He’s the brains…….” Elvira was a power player when she entered the big time in the year 2000, Buckwheat. Since that time, she garnered international recognition almost instantly, because she was in the Global Elite of Central Bankers, IMF, and other similar institutions.
Rather than rely on obscure one line knock off comments, I prefer to look at overall records, and accounts of peers. Recently, I did some exploring and while it takes quite an effort to ignore biased, lies, paid shills, I was able to put find an article-one of several-that seems truthful, balanced, and fair:
You bear a strong similarity and schmucky ducky to a high school teacher that needs impressionable young minds to feel that vitality that knows no demand for his chattering ability and “what other people are saying”.
The upper limit for you would be a teaching assistant job at a third tier collage or junior two year institution.
…”Like a clown”.
Certainly agree that Putin and his crew should not be awarding permanent residence, let alone citizenship, to so many ethnically, linguistically, culturally Turkic central asians.
But even if the RF had no central asian immigration, the Slavic peoples are already ensuring their own decline and demise by refusing to have children. As you know, pathetically low fertility rates prevail across Russia, Belarus, the (pre-war) ukraine, and most of the balkan and eastern european nations.
Slavs will not be able to hold their land, and its vast natural resources, without a bigger supply of younger people, especially younger men. Perhaps the policy of letting the central asians settle the RF “legally” is just accelerating what is bound to happen anyway.
Nonetheless, instead of admitting a flood of central asian Turkic people, the Russian Federation could be making a serious effort to attract (non-muslim) white and eurasian settlers from the dying European and European-descended police states, I.e. the USA, the uk, Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and NZ.
Without one of these sources of manpower for labor and for defense, the RF cannot be prosperous, strong, or an organized stable productive effective society with realistic hope for the future.
Would it be realistic — or even desirable — to develop tens of millions of robots to do the work in the factories, the fields, and the military that can no longer be done by the aged, aging and dwindling Slavic population?
For better or for worse, young people considering a move to the Russian Federation (like a couple of our children) are well-advised to learn about Muslim beliefs, mores, customs and expectations. Wouldn’t hurt to know Turkish, as a language closely related to the turkic languages of the new “Russians”, either. (Exception is the Tajiks, whose main language is I think related to Farsi instead,)
There’s nothing temporary about the settlement of many millions of Turkic (and some Persian) central asian peoples in the Russian Federation.
The RF grants PERMANENT residence and CITIZENSHIP to half a million non-Slavic central asians every year now: Tajiks most of all in most years, but also Kazakhs and Uzbeks … with a much smaller but recurrent smattering of Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and even Azerbaijanis and Turks.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1203451/immigration-by-country-in-russia/
Exactly how will the older and slowly dwindling Slavic population remove the younger and rapidly growing central-asian population? If anything like current fertility and immigration trends continue, that will become nearly a physical impossibility within a mere thirty years.
Prepare for a Russian Federation populace that consists increasingly of mixed Slavic/Turkic people, split between an observant Muslim plurality, large segments of non-practicing nominal Muslims and nominal christians, and by far the smallest segment: practicing christian Slavs.
So the solution is socialism (allpowerful state)?
Why chase/worship money if doesn’t have any value?
Spanky, schmucky ducky, like a clown.
It completely flies over your head, that you are proving my claims about you.
Again, the logic:
Logos appeals to the audience’s reason, building up logical arguments. Ethos appeals to the speaker’s status or authority, making the audience more likely to trust them. Pathos appeals to the emotions, trying to make the audience feel angry or sympathetic, for example.
So, now you have tried Ethos, by building yourself up as the authority, and to do that you also use Pathos. By tearing others down, you elevate yourself.
Pathos is your latest attempt, by making the audience feel angry at me and sympathetic toward you. I would say your responses are also sociopathic. It’s not a good combination, a sociopathic midwit.
A real mensch would always attempt to elevate the conversation – to build up, and to also learn from warranted criticism. Do you ever see Ron Unz using your type of language or argumentation?
The proper response would not be not to call out Hudson or Alexander, but try to learn from them. They are saying things that don’t comport with what you think you know, like the confusion evidenced by Nabiullina. Obviously, her ignorance and confusion, does not comport with your hero worship of her. If she is confused and ignorant, you have to incorporate that into your worldview, rather than striking out and calling others names. It is tiresome talking to midwits and sociopaths, fortunately others will read this and perhaps benefit.
I think you mean within Russia proper. The Kremlin, the entire government, and the Orthodox Church is giving increased fertility of Orthodox Slavs the highest priority, with subsidies, including free housing for a certain number of children. No other country is expending as much effort or capital in this endeavor.
If and when the Christian Slav and hopefully Western Caucasian immigration creates positive fertility, then the immigration from the ‘Stans will be reduced.
https://www.rt.com/search?q=russian+birth+rate
If necessary, I would make women unable to attain professional status or higher education unless they birthed 2 or more children. Russia is no different than any other industrialized country. Stay in the JUSA, Canada, and the Non-“White” immigrant you have to live with is 5 times worse.
Yep. Spot on.
https://www.unz.com/article/massive-us-biowar-funding-created-biowar-vax-industrial-complex-threatens-to-swallow-the-west/#comment-
I purposefully posted the link earlier, but I get it that people don’t have the time to chase around random links and try to incorporate the new info into their brain-space.
Kirill and the WRPC is thinking along the same lines as you:
During its meeting of late March 2024 it adopted a document that stated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a “Holy War. ”The document stated that the war had the goal of “protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism.”
In the document is language about how to deal with the third world “southern” influx, and also how to handle upcoming massive European immigration from the west, and to making housing and family formation affordable for the existing population – to increase fertility of the Rus. (Nothing yet about a new Tsar system, but a new monarchy is also Kirill’s position.)
He doesn’t know. He has no experience except repeating the doctrines and pronouncement of others. IOW, he is the equivalent of a librarian, not a content producer or man or action.
The above is you having trouble letting go of your precious shibboleths. Money is a creature of the law. If you don’t pay your taxes, men with guns show up at your door. Law, force, and money are all part of the same thing. Our (((friends))) have created private debt/credit banks, and the first one to host a country was the Bank of England in 1694. They pretended that their bank credit could claim gold, but that was always a lie. These new “international” finance corporations then parasitized the law to work for their class and ethnic interests.
Money doesn’t have any intrinsic value other than what the law allows. Sorry if that is bad news.
Hudson sort of answered your question already. The main dividing lines of civilizations are how they handle money, taxes (fiscal policy), and rents. You have to tax away rents and unearned income. The money is to be sovereign, not private.
Here is Alexander asking Hudson what to do:
What do you do if economies are on the wrong track? How do you change track, especially if you have the vested interests controlling the electoral system so much that they really block any kind of third party from the duopoly that’s developed? How do you solve the political problem that is protecting the economic quandary?
Hudson:
Nobody’s been able to solve that problem short of a revolution, and yet it’s not, people aren’t ready for it. They’re blaming themselves. We’re going to blame the victim, blame the debtors for being impatient, for over-consuming, for not saving enough, while not giving them an opportunity to have a job that enables them to pay the cost of living and build up the savings.
Your attempts to make money have some sort of intrinsic value says nothing about other variables in economy, such as the law, debts, and rents. Intrinsic value gold bugs live in an alternate universe. Even during the gold eras, they they still had debt problems, such as Rome’s collapse.
(That said, there is a use for gold today, for example, the trading gold standard, where gold is used as an accounting gimmick to mark international trade flows.)
Mercouris is almost gleeful explaining about Nabiullina being perplexed by the strong performance of the Russian economy.
It seems like people are not getting the joke.
Nabiullina is an Atlanticist austerity hawk. She’s there to make sure the Russian economy doesn’t expand and develop. She’s there to make sure the neoliberal rent extraction capital outflows continue.
It’s not just confusion.
Stop flailing away at the branches! Strike at the root…
The current model of banking and currency is based on the Bank of England model, founded in 1694. Benjamin Franklin stated that the main reason for the American Revolutionary War was the insistence by George III that the American colonies accept Bank of England banknotes, which were issued as promissory notes, rather than use the increasingly successful American fiat script, issued by the colonies in the CORRECT quantity and not bearing debt! We must be prepared for a new monetary system, an honest one, when our present debt-based banking cartel collapses. Kindly read and critique this proposed Constitutional Amendment. But first, a little background…
From “The Truth in Money Book” by Theodore R. Thorsen and Richard F Warner:
QUOTE Someone had to borrow at usury to bring that money [checkbook balances, bills and coins] into existence. The money goes out of existence as the usury and the debt principal are paid back to the bank. These amounts are huge: several billion dollars go out of existence each day. [Actually this money goes into the reserve accounts of the Federal Reserve Banks, out of the hands of the public! This book was first printed in November 1980. The amounts which are withdrawn presently are much larger.] If the money is not replaced with new loans, a shortage occurs. Soon individuals and businesses experience serious cash flow problems. These result in more and more loan applications to banks—the only place where money is being created to replenish the supply” UNQUOTE
Here is one possible solution—-To Hell with Fractional-Reserve Debt-Based Banking Constitutional Amendment
(1) Rescind the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and rename existing Federal Reserve notes and check book balances, in all U.S. banking and credit-creating institutions as well as foreign holdings of dollars, on a 1-to-1 basis, as U.S. Treasury Dollars and U.S.Treasury-Denominated bank balances. All currently existing financial contracts of the Federal Reserve Banking System, including United States Treasury Bills, Notes, Bonds, and Inflation-Protected Securities, remain in effect.
(2) Henceforward, ex nihilo credit creation by banking and financial institutions in the United States is prohibited. Loans are required to originate from previous savings of U.S. Treasury Dollars and U.S. Treasury-Denominated bank balances from accounts only authorized by account holders for lending purposes. Each loan is held in and paid from a specified, sequestered loan account by the various financial institutions, with interest charges and term limits for each loan to be determined solely by the bank management and the contracting party. Non-cash reserves held in the regional Federal Reserve Banks in accounts of the member institutions of the Federal Reserve System no longer form the basis for credit creation and are extinguished via accounting erasure. Any further payments of principal and interest on currently-existing promissory notes owned by any bank are required to be distributed to holders of savings accounts and checking accounts in that bank in a manner to be determined by each bank, such procedures to be transparent to savings or checking account holders at that bank in terms of amount and frequency of payment. Regional Federal Reserve Banks continue to provide check-clearing operations for the member banks.
(3) Monetary transactions of the regional Federal Reserve banks or of its member banks with international banks, including the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund, can not include ex nihilo credit creation.
(4) The U.S. Treasury supplies Treasury Dollars as needed to any member bank of the Federal Reserve system to satisfy demands for cash by deposit and savings account holders in excess of cash reserves held by banks at the time of enactment of this amendment.
(5) Fund the U.S. government and its agencies and projects directly via Treasury Dollars authorized by the Congress in its yearly federal budget. The borrowing of money from the Federal Reserve system of banks or from other institutions or individuals to pay for federal government expenditures is prohibited. All outstanding Treasury Securities are henceforward redeemed on demand via payment with U.S. Treasury Dollars.
(6) Abolish the Federal Income Tax on individuals, corporations, and business enterprises while maintaining a social security tax on individual incomes. Social security retirement revenues are strictly sequestered in Federal Government Retirement Accounts held by the U.S. Treasury and managed by the Social Security Administration. The Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is hereby rescinded and the Internal Revenue Service disbanded.
(7) Institute a federal sales tax with a varying yearly tax rate adjusted by the U.S. Congress in session, the sole aim of such adjustments being to maintain a stable or decreasing Consumer Price Index based on data collected by the Federal Government. Any such federal sales taxes taken in by the Federal Government are extinguished from the currency supply to keep the Consumer Price Index stable or decreasing and are not utilized for further funding.
(8) Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution is amended to read as follows: The Congress shall have Power to collect customs duties on imports and exports, uniformly applied throughout the United States, and to provide for the Defence and general Welfare of the United States.
(9) Article 1, Section 8, Clause 2 of the U. S. Constitution is rescinded.
(10) The adoption of this amendment does not prohibit the use by the citizens of the United States of any alternative currencies they should choose to use in their private or commercial transactions, provided both parties to the transaction agree to the medium of exchange.
Sorry, but I think you and Mefobills are both lazy and stupid. Especially you. What are you doing here?
https://www.rt.com/business/593207-russian-business-expand-friendly-countries/
https://www.rt.com/russia/592953-putin-traditional-values-foreigners/
State Duma to review report on Russian Central Bank’s work in 2023
Four State Duma’s committees stressed that the aftermath of the “shock” of 2022 due to an unprecedented sanctions pressure was passed thanks to anti-crisis measures swiftly taken by the Russian government and the Bank of Russia
https://tass.com/politics/1772863
She is an Atlantacist for sure.
Some people are knuckleheads and cannot let go of their shibboleths, like Gvalter and Poupon above. It might be a joke, Mercouris was laughing at her at Hudson was nodding along and grinning.
She also was surprised when Russian reserves were confiscated and frozen (about $300 billion). What a dope.
The parasitic mind by Gad Saad, mirrors what I have been noticing for years. Many human brains are defective, they become myelin sheathed, and it is too much work to undo what you think you know.
Fascinating. What do you think of the structure and performance of the Bank of Russia, its financial ministry, and related agencies?
I heard a well regarded financial writer once say, that the Federal Government wastes more than 50 cents on the dollar, and could more and better with less than half the money. What do you think? True? I believe it is.
Thanks.
Money is very old, but the modern intensive necessity of money dates from the invention of capitalism.
The question of how capitalism was started. It originated in England, with enclosure acts and game laws, and the transportation acts. The commons was taken away from the people, and their traditional means of self provisioning was cut off. People were forced into employment for a capitalist in order to have something to eat and get clothes and shelter. Money was the intermediary. Traditional means of self provisioning were ended or outlawed. People couldn’t harvest game as before. The countryside was in rebellion. The system was implemented piecemeal because the resistance would have been overwhelming. So people were forced to chase money to get food clothing and shelter. So the forced, coerced need for money over time became a fetish, because for the masses, that is the ticket to get anything.
Prior to that, people could provide for themselves with little need for money.
Another method was employed by the British in Africa, the hut tax. Pay us the hut tax, or we’ll burn down your hut. So the natives were forced to work on plantations to get coin, or suffer loss of their hut. Got to get it.
And that’s the (modern, recent, short) story of money. Got to get it or else. Got to get it becomes ‘my precious’.
All the successes of the Russian businesses are the results of their own efforts. Not Nabiullina.
Sociopaths lack self-awareness. The above is you attempting yet another logical fallacy, divide and conquer, and using guilt.
What are you doing here, implies that question has no right to comment or be here, or have an opinion, especially if it differs from you. He has as much right to his opinion as you do yours.
What a P.O.S. Poop On
It si posible yo solve the Debt Payment.
You should talk to Ellen Brown, she says that DEBT ISUE CAN BE, or should be, SOLVED without a Revolución.
Fernando
The cousinhood of Rhodes and Oppenheimer, instituted a head tax as well. You have to pay the head tax in Rand at the end of the year. This then allowed goods to be priced in the money unit. Negroes suddenly found out that goods had a money price.
Oh wait! They were mining gold, and gold has intrinsic value!
Soon enough gold was flowing out of S.A. and diamonds from Rhodesia, to the Cousinhood in London. The Boer war helped the finance capitalist corporatocracy and its hidden Oligarchs.
Russian interest rates:
“The Bank of Russia held its benchmark interest rate at 16% in its March 2024 meeting”
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/interest-rate
expand to ten years to see what Nabiullina has been doing during her time at the central bank.
Compared to other central banks, US, Canada, UK, etc, the Russian central bank interest rates have been usurious. And further, the current rate, 16% is usury.
Mr. Marx is contending that Nabiullina is doing something positive for the Russian economy in the face of reality, that Nabiullina is maintaining usurious interest rates, current 16%
Nabiullina is sandbagging the Russian economy, not helping, The irony, that Mr. Marx would contend that a usurer is responsible for Russia’s economic success.
Commercial rates are always higher than central bank rates.
Russian mortgage rates now ~20% and up.
consummer loans between 20 and 30%.
Sber bank NIM over 5%.
Ouch.
Ah! Don’t you love the new “equality” America.
https://www.rt.com/news/595710-black-reparations-slavery-taxes/
Someone has to tell this congresswoman that you cannot rebuild broken bridges without taxes.
Hudson:
You remake an economics curriculum that revives the concept of rent-seeking. This is not something that’s taught in neoliberal academic universities today, either in Europe or the United States, except in the business schools telling new business people how to extract more economic rent from the rest of the society.
So it’s a combination of re-education, of political realignment, and recognizing that the terms right and left no longer have any meaning for the financial sector.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS
The challenge is to make sure that when the change does come, it is not as chaotic and as dangerous as it might be. And the way to do that is to prepare in advance and to think through, understand what the problems are, and how to address those problems, and then what to do beyond the point where those problems have been reached.
______________________
There might be a way to guide the coming collapse/change, so it is not chaotic and dangerous, and we don’t get incinerated in nuclear fire. The idea is to put a new “head” onto the United States. A recapitulation of the Federal Structure that was put into place by the founders after the revolutionary war is possible, and that can only be done if individual States band together and begin re-asserting their sovereignty; civilizational control by international finance capital out of wall street is rule by psychopaths.
https://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/how-to-start-a-public-bank.pdf
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-mysterious-cafrs-how_b_585011
1) Germany especially looks for about $500 million in T-Bills. The actual exact amount needed can be calculated once the CAFR is known. If Germany cannot get them, maybe borrow some on the down-low from China. The T-Bills are to get the ball rolling until CAFR stagnant pools transfer from wall street banks back to Texas.
2) Take T-Bills in hand to Texas (or Florida) and have a frank conversation with Greg Abbott.
3) T-Bills are to be used to start a Texas State Bank. The bills may return to Germany once Texas CAFR “stagnant pools” capitalize the new State Bank. However, it would be wiser to leave them there to influence the new bank, if possible.
4) Note: T-Bills are near money, not just debt instruments, and they are allowed to be placed into reserves at the bank. Once placed in reserves, T-bills may be leveraged, so the small amount of T-bill capital has a big effect, enough to start a bank. The capital position of a bank is not just its reserves, but also other Tier 1 assets.
5) Before the State Bank Charter is approved by Texas voters; there is a caveat required by Germany that is written into the new banks charter. A school is to be continuously funded by some of the state bank’s profits, where said school teaches sovereign classical economics, including rent theory. A permanent chair is funded, perhaps at University of Texas. Students get to see the inside working of the state bank as part of the graduating curriculum, and also have Trivium style debates about civilizational precepts. This is the pipeline to find new non- psychopathic statesmen for the future, a type of individual that tends to have public spirit, and is not driven by material desires, hubris and ego.
So, why the complex maneuvering, which really isn’t that complex or expensive? Germany and Europe are vassals of the U.S. The U.S. in turn is in vassalage and captured by the international corporatocracy, which won in WW2.
The other point of pressure, is that German companies are leaving Germany anyway, especially since the pipeline sabotage made fuel costs high. Direct German industry, and concentrate them in Texas. This is a temporary measure until Texas Senators can begin to work in alignment with German interests. In the short term, Texas senators can be bribed/influenced by German industrial transplants, so Texas senators are no longer in bondage to wall street donor class.
Why Texas? It has its own power grid, and is the most powerful state to lead the U.S. out of the coming collapse, and it can better do the job if it has its own money power. Behind the new state bank Texas independence, is some German influence helping guide the coming chaos. Germany needs to be very clever to extricate itself from vassalage status.
What is the cost of war? It easily runs into the billions. What is the cost of being incinerated by the psychos? Pro-actively spending only millions $ to influence your new overlord, is something strategic that can be done now rather than letting chaos run wild, and engulf us.
The idea is to collapse the current U.S. rule by international corporatocracy, and return power to the states. The founders always intended for the individual states to be powerful, and run by state authority.
The students will soon uncover how the U.S. was sabotaged, and will formulate plans to undo said sabotage. Repealing the 17’th will likely be high on the to-do list, but it is impossible with current crop of stooge populist senators, who take their tickets from the donor class.
It’s highly possible the Texas State Bank, once in operation, can help re-industrialize Germany, as sovereign banks are industrial capitalist, not finance capitalist.
Note: Abbot is a conservatard. He was in India butt-smooching for new H1B legal immigrants, while at the same time kvetching about illegal immigrant invaders from the southern border. Conservatards only think about business interests and money, hence their greed can be appealed to. They don’t think in civilizational terms, like what is the impact of replacing native Texans with HIB Indian immigrants. Conservatards would never do a state bank on their own, but would do it if the pot was sweetened with new TBills. Appeals to Abbot, and Texas senators’ greed today, while improving the future, is something even they would go for. At some level, they must know that German immigrants and new German industry is a preferable solution to the current trajectory.
The T-Bills can also be thought of as a military strategic good, preventing the unnecessary build up of war machinery. A small diversion from the military budget may be comprehended by a consciously aware General in the Bundeswehr.
Before the usual ankle-biters reply, here is another comment by Hudson, which is absolutely correct, and needs to marinate on your brain:
And the main distinction, what makes one society different from another society? What makes the U.S. and Europe, the NATO, different from the global majority? It really ultimately comes down to how it’s organized financially. Is the financial institution public or is it privatized? How does it handle debt? These are what distinguishes almost every society from another. And if they begin by a financial restructuring, which is the basis of mutual gain, you’re dealing with a completely different economic system.
The idea is to go directly to ground zero, to how it is organized financially. That ground zero finance zone is the reserve loops of banks, which has leverage – meaning a small amount in the right place can create an outsized effect. TBills are general purchasing power, so the Federal reserve private bank system cannot do a damn thing if Germany decided to “gift” TBills to Texas. The agents of Mammon in wall street might become alarmed and run add campaigns, and do backroom influence, so that will have to be countered in social media and make appeals to citizens for their improved welfare. Social media also is leverage, as it bypasses the corporate news media.
I.e. money is controlled/created/issued by a and/or with the backing of a big powerful central government?
What do you mean by private debt?
How do you
without a big powerful central government?
Is income from owning land/means of production?
What is the difference between sovereign money and socialist/state/big government money?
I think money should represent real value, not be a tool parasites can use to defraud people who produce real value.
Putin said to Tucker Carlson Russia and China are neighbors so it is their business to have good relations with each other. Why do Americans think Russia would choose America over China? Why don’t Americans realize many countries prefer neutrality (including China)?
You know I am not enchanted with places that mandate a majority of male organ to be mutilated.
In Russia btw they do not practice MGM, other than for Moslem minorities.
Because of tribal ties of US and Russian Federation elits, thats why. They are all originating from the same Ukrania, understanding each other well.
Because Russia is afraid of Chinese nationalists, thats why not. China’s PLA would steamroll up to Urals and Caucasus in a week long blitz if it wants to.
They are letting speculative developers tank… No bailouts. But China urbanization rate is lower than developed countries so even with dropping populations – hundreds of millions still need urban housing.
China’s property isn’t like Singapore which is mostly government built either.
Lastly – American David Goldman did a large analysis. 1) aside from China trading with the Global South more than “the west” (ASEAN is a bigger trade bloc for China than the U.S. or EU) 2) places like Mexico and Vietnam and India that have increased their goods supply to the US – get their materials (intermediate goods) from China.
Thanks for the response, you raise all good points that cheer me up.
From a street level view there has been a slow down in manufacturing here, and those kinds of jobs only pay about 20-30 rmb an hour. They hire kids (17-25 years old) from the countryside (Southwest China and Anhui etc..) who do 12 hour shifts each day for 3 months with 1 day off per week. The kids will never be able to afford a home in a major city, so combine their savings and their parents so they can purchase a home in their hometown(and wife basically – still need dowry in small towns). Even then a good number of factories around me have closed and the dorms the kids stay in together are empty.
I hope these are only issues in the near term and the economy can recover as the bad debt goes and a more stable economic base is built – and families can begin purchasing homes in the city again. Otherwise I fear only speculation and foreign capital could rise them from their current funk (while creating another bubble).
You make some very good points. Subsidy being one of them. Ironically the US propaganda channel Bloomberg News has a short piece noting the “blunders” the US made in the semiconductor industry. It notes that many of technologies underpinning the Extreme Ultraviolet lithography machines made by Dutch company ASML were funded by the US government. It was done so with the explicit objective of beating “ally” Japan’s two lithography companies – who were in the lead at the time – Canon and Nikon. That even the slightest bit of shame in their statement. Even worse is the Japanese happily carry along as sacrificial lambs as they have since the first atom bomb was tested on them.
In essence – subsidy for companies or technology is only ok if the US does it. The European Union tries to pull the same garbage. But US doctrine basically is that subsidizing anything is not good… Governments should only spend their money on wars. It’s surreal stuff.
That is not unique to Slavic people (low birth rates). I mean they are nowhere near as low as South Korea. But in any event – what is the supposed solution except getting people to have more sex and bring forth more children. Fact is testosterone in men keeps declining and social media has overtaken sex as a past time. Women continue to mover higher up in the workforce. All things that cause fertility rates to crash. So what do you propose???
Huh? From what I read of history the US was a British colony. The largest source of European blood in the US are Germans. So what are these tribal ties you speak of that override Anglo Saxons??? Is it because Kaiser Wilhelm and the Tsar were related???
Also that is nonsense projection. Indeed there are zealot Chinese who want to take back parts of the Russian Far East that the CPC agreed to give up claims on (nothing to do with the Urals nor the Caucus)… Just like they are angry the Chinese government gave up claims to Mongolia and Kazahkstan and Tajikistan and Myanmar that were parts of the Qing dynasty China. Those are a fringe element. Sensible Chinese – in the majority – believe in having good relations with China’s neighbors – in the same way sensible Putin understands it in the reverse. The Chinese mind is not the western mind. Sorry but those claims are ridiculous all around.
Good points. Though the housing registration system changes are encouraging more jobs in cities that are not the Tier 1 cities now. That is to spur demand in those cities and away from the approaching first world expensive first tier cities. It also will keep people closer to their ancestral homes. Both should help birth rates go up somewhat.
Yea, and on top of those reasons the education policies to reduce the number of kids going into high school and uni should slowly start building up a “breeding class” that work in factories/run small businesses and live closer to their parents who can provide free child support. Even though hiring nannies is relatively cheap it’s hard to find those of good quality and who will do anything but basic care.
Will these steps be enough though? Will the manufacturing sector be enough to keep the rest of the economy a float while the less educated can get decent homes and start having 2-3 kids?
Previously I thought more drastic steps would be required like a strong propaganda push to get women out of the workforce and into the home (could do it through the Ancient Dramas they love so much, show more of the lead ladies not just falling in love but having multiple kids too). But, if keep a certain amount of women working in factories as teens, being a 20 year old mother is going to be a more attractive choice naturally – especially if got 4 grandparents nearby to help.
Well none of us knows what will happen going forward. But I wouldn’t worry too much about the economy… Now social issues related to a dropping population are different. Russia and Japan for instance have both pushed back up their fertility rates slightly. I expect China to be able to also. But neither Russia nor Japan has gotten it back up to replacement rate. I expect similar in China… Close – but not back fully. In fact births did go back up in the past year. But in reality unless a country goes poor – birth rates don’t really go back above replacement. I don’t think there is a case. That’s why the west imports lots of migrants. I don’t see any Asian country doing it…
Find it funny that so many people in the West keep talking about low birth rate as if they don’t know anything about automation. A lot writers had blamed China for job loss in the US. Some, in contrast, suggested that automation explains most of the job loss in the US.
Germane to China, 1) Historically, great national renewal such as between the West and East Han, the Tang, and etc all preceded by huge population lost because of instability.
2) The population loss due to the One Child Policy is probably exaggerated.
According to the authors of “Lost and Found: The “Missing Girls” in Rural China”,
their studies had concluded that the street-level bureaucrat theory and mutual noncompliance explains how more than 10 million girls can be “hidden” in China’s population data.