ZEITGEIST

...In case you didn't see it ...

Anti-Colonialism's Unfinished Business

Americans are starting to wake up to reality, as a foreign observer put it:

Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel. Our society isn’t what it pretends to be. Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world. Our pundits wag their fingers at the “tyrannical regimes” in empire-targeted nations while our own rulers murder, starve and terrorize disobedient populations in order to dominate the planet. In school they teach us that we are lucky to live in a free society where the people command the government with their votes and we have the right to express ourselves in whatever way we choose, when in reality wealthy oligarchs control the entire electoral process and our expression is aggressively manipulated through a complex system of censorship and propaganda. We have no integrity.

How long has this been going on? For that, we might take an historical perspective beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which oversaw the infamous Scramble for Africa:

Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see; and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow.

Still can't join the dots? Then listen to Prof. Richard Wolff lay it all out in a succinct summary:



Now we get to the purpose of this post, Anti-colonialism's Unfinished Business. It seems as if the Unfinished Business has finally made it onto the agenda:



And for an oncore, don't miss THIS.

What if everything America did ...

Came Home to America?



UPDATE: As you can see from the above, censorship is alive and well in the USA. Here in its place is a worthy contender:

THE EMPIRE IS RUNNING OUT OF MISSILES.

The Funeral: A Nation’s Verdict

This author summarizes it succinctly:

After the death of {eighth president of Iran, Ebrahim} Raisi, the majority of the people voted for Pezeshkian. They gave the reformist a chance, and he repaid them with appeasement while the enemy repaid them with bombs. The coalition of the United States, Israel, and their Gulf vassals, a cabal of pederasts and client kings, launched two waves of attacks on Iran. They killed thousands of civilians. They struck homes, hospitals, sports complexes, and infrastructure. On the first day, they targeted the Minab school. These were not strategic objectives; there is no military logic to bombing a school. These were satanic sacrifices, rituals of demoralization intended to crush the will of a people, to prove that no place was safe, that even children at their desks were legitimate prey. They armed ethnic minorities to attack infrastructure from within, trying to fracture the nation along fault lines they had spent decades mapping. They violated every conceivable international law with the impunity of those who know the institutions are their own.

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf stated “the era of one-sided deals is OVER,” posting the {Memorandum of Understanding} MOU’s text with Iran’s privileges highlighted: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts” for free passage of commercial vessels through Hormuz, “for 60 days only.”

What happens next?

And what happens now to the (mostly) indifferent public of the West? Here is a possibility (probability?):

An Historic Inflection Point

Just twelve days ago I posted that "Iran is making history". Although many of us somehow intuited that our world was on the cusp of momentous changes, we probably didn't realize (at the time) just how earth-shattering they would be, once the dust cleared. The pace of activity picked up (I won't detail it here since there are a plethora of analyses by capable authors one can reference), and just one week after my post, Peter Haenseler via the blog of former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson summarized the "state of affairs" in the following manner:

No one expected Donald Trump to sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)—especially in Versailles. Iran is taking its place at the big table with the major powers, and the world looks different—we’re asking questions—many of which have no answers.

Although the dust hadn't (and still hasn't) settled, the immediate question on everybody's lips was:

What drove Trump to hurriedly sign the MoU?

The President himself let slip the answer to that question during a masterful display of circumlocution at the following press conference. The answer makes its debut at 2:35😆:



Neither I nor Larry C. Johnson are oil industry specialists, but Larry has conveniently done his homework before I could begin researching the issue (more HERE, and a further update HERE). Coming to think of it, I should just refer you to Larry C. Johnson's blog since he has done a masterful job of following, researching and documenting this entire affair.

I will perhaps end with a segment from another Middle East analyst of the highest caliber, the incomparable Alastair Crooke. in which he quotes a former senior Israeli Iran military intelligence analyst:

An unquestioned dogma has bitten the dust:

“The long-standing expectation in parts of Jerusalem and Washington has been that sustained pressure could lead to regime change in Tehran … [However] the announced agreement suggests a [new] fundamental reality: The campaign that many hoped would weaken or even destabilise the Islamic Republic will instead conclude with the regime intact, strengthened, and formally engaged by the U.S. … [This] amounts to the collapse of a broader strategic assumption: that coordinated American and Israeli pressure could generate conditions conducive to fundamental political change inside Iran. Instead, the likely outcome is the opposite … [it is] an outcome likely to reinforce confidence amongst [Iran’s] ruling elite rather than weaken it …”.
This moment represents a major strategic achievement for Iran: A heroic image is surging across the globe – whereas Israel’s isolation on the Iran issue, even amongst its Gulf allies, has spiked. On the personal level, Netanyahu’s standing in Israel has plunged catastrophically.

Glory Be!

Iran is making history.



More from former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, Larry C. Johnson.

This is where the stock markets stood yesterday. What will they be like today?

The Crash of the International Dollar Market?

The background to understanding what may be imminent is the recycling of the Petro-dollar:

Especially during the years 1974–1981 and 2005–2014, oil exporters amassed large surpluses of "petrodollars" from the sale of oil at historically high prices.[1][2][8] (The word has been credited alternately to Egyptian-American economist Ibrahim Oweiss and to former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson, both in 1973.)[9][10][11] These petrodollar surpluses could be described as net U.S. dollar-equivalents earned from the export of petroleum, in excess of the internal development needs of the exporting countries.[12] The International Monetary Fund argues that these surpluses could not be efficiently invested in their own economies, due to small populations or being at early stages of industrialization. Instead, the IMF advocated for the surpluses to be invested in other locations, most notably the United States, or spent on imports such as consumer products, construction supplies, and military equipment. Additionally, the IMF also argues that global economic growth would have suffered if money was withdrawn from the world economy and stored in the reserves of developing nations, while the oil-exporting states needed to be able to invest profitably to raise their long-term standards of living.[13] Alternatively, critics argue that the international monetary system, reliant on petrodollar recycling, exploits developing nations while advancing American imperialism.[14]

Economist Michael Hudson is more blunt:

Under the rules of (the 7th US national security advisor and 56th US secretary of state, serving under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) (Henry) Kissinger — and all this was explained to me by the Treasury and the State Department, in 1974 and 1975 — the US military told Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, “You can charge whatever you want for oil, but you have to use the surplus have to invest in the United States. We’re not going to let you buy control of any major American firms. You can’t buy American companies; only we can buy control of foreign economies. You’ll buy bonds. You can finance American industry and American companies. You can buy stocks in the companies. You can make money by just depositing your money in banks”. These were the petrodollars. The petrodollars were the savings of OPEC countries invested in banks.

Enter the War against Iran, resulting in extensive damage to oil facilities and US military bases in the Middle East, not to mention the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Michael Hudson adds:

Now that the OPEC countries are blocked from having export earnings, they’ve announced, “Well, we’ve actually debt-leveraged our own economy. Rich as we are, our real estate projects and our investments are financed by debt, and we have to begin selling off our holdings of US securities, and gold, in order to keep our domestic budgets and the balance of payments in balance”. So all of this now is leading to a sell-off of dollars. And this has reversed what was the whole petrodollar, the whole inflow of OPEC money, into the currency, of oil into dollars. Now, this is becoming a drain on dollars.

Analyst Alexaner Mercouris sounds the alarm in the case of the United Arab Emirates' petition for US dollar swaps in this podcast (from 1:30 to 14:30), but the key discussion is undertaken by Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau in the following video:

Beyond a Failed Narrative

This memorable speech was given by author, essayist, and lecturer Patrick Lawrence, previously a correspondent abroad for the International Herald Tribune, upon the publication of his book Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.

Americans are living a failed national narrative. Our almost universal belief in our exceptional status as a providentially "chosen people" suspends us in a beguiling myth beyond the reality of history. On September 11, 2001, we reacted with an almost child-like innocence. President George Bush soared in the polls when he doubled down on the familiar troupe that America has the ability to remake the world in our own image through the force of arms. Rather than summon imagination, wisdom and courage to offer an alternative, Democratic presidential hopefuls fell over themselves to support Bush in invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. In his most recent book Time No Longer, Patrick Lawrence movingly regrets the road not taken. The events of 2001 confronted us with choice. We could accept that our national narrative had failed and that the time had arrived to abandon our dreams of empire and dismantle our imperial presidency. Or we could resist change and remain in a state of denial that would compound our self-destructive conduct. The Republican and Democratic parties -- who purport to lead America -- choose wrongly. Instead of restoring separation of powers and embracing the constitutional exceptionalism of the American Republic, America would continue down the militarized path of telling the world what to do.

US Imperialism attacks

Imperialism attacks:

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela rejects, repudiates, and denounces before the international community the grave military aggression perpetrated by the current government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and its population in the civilian and military areas of Caracas, the capital of the Republic, and the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira. This act constitutes a flagrant violation of the Charter of the United Nations, especially Articles 1 and 2, which enshrine respect for sovereignty, the legal equality of states, and the prohibition of the use of force. Such aggression threatens international peace and stability, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and places the lives of millions of people at grave risk.

The objective of this attack is none other than to seize Venezuela's strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, attempting to forcibly break the nation's political independence. They will not succeed. After more than two hundred years of independence, the people and their legitimate government remain steadfast in defense of sovereignty and the inalienable right to determine their own destiny. The attempt to impose a colonial war to destroy the republican form of government and force a "regime change", in alliance with the fascist oligarchy, will fail like all previous attempts.

Before the Maduro charade begins, it is important for you to view this:



THIS is also worth a view.

Israel had better hope and pray that there is no God

I cannot bring myself to commment on this, so I will let others discuss it. As an introduction, I place the following:

...urgent testimonials from doctors, journalists and aid workers in Gaza (as well as from Crisis Group’s own contacts) suggests that hunger has reached a tipping point. The WFP reports that one in three Palestinians in Gaza now go for days on end without food. Médecins Sans Frontières says it treated three times more patients for severe malnutrition in the first two weeks of July than in all of May. Agence France Presse, the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press have issued a joint protest, declaring that their own reporters and families in Gaza are starving. By 23 July, Gaza hospitals were reporting ten to fifteen deaths from starvation every 24 hours – far more than the monthly average over 21 months of war.

Once this tipping point is passed, famines tend to follow a catastrophically self-reinforcing pattern, which is already visible in Gaza. A slow creep of death yields to swift mass mortality as organs fail, immune systems collapse and victims lose the will to go on. Once famine begins, deaths tend to rise exponentially, meaning that waiting for confirmation that the technical line has been crossed to take remedial action could condemn thousands of people – especially young children – to death. For children, surviving such a scenario may entail permanent disability, including cognitive impairment. Some may already be facing exactly this prospect.

Charles 'Chas' Freeman Jr. is a retired American diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years. Trita Parsi is an Iranian-born Swedish writer and activist, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council.


By the way, I have one final request: Please DONATE to Gaza's Roots' Initiative.

A "geopolitical" rant to Americans (who have been force-fed the Koolaide)

I'm not sure many Americans are aware how much their outlook concerning various geopolitical affairs (for those few that care about such things), is manufactured as a form of consent for the aims their secret government is pursuing at any given point in time. A salient (and recent) example of the effectiveness of this government policy is the following ...

I have my own political views on these things, but I have to laugh to myself as I observe events unfold during what has transpired of this decade. I think more Americans are unfortunately prone to drinking their government's Koolaide than not. They need to wake up.👀

Wokeness has become a "thing" these days. Interestingly, the term "woke" eschews immutability: A "dormant" person may become "woke", but equally a "woke" person may become "dormant". However, a more terminal "antithesis" to wokeness is "blindness".

This takes me to another related topic: American hubris is its own worst enemy:

The heads of Russia and Iran were both hopelessly (or so it may have seemed) Pro-Western at one time. Not any more!

It almost seems as though the following never happened:

The U.S. Consul General, Jack Gosnell, had a close relationship with Putin when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The two of them worked closely to create joint ventures and other ways to promote relations between the two countries. Gosnell related that Putin was always straightforward, courteous and helpful.

As for Masoud Pezeshkian, his pro-Western leanings were never in doubt.

However, Western "soberbia" in dealing with both turned them into "Anti-Western" leaders, thereby roundly defeating any purpose or outcome the Western establishment may have sought through its collective foreign policy over the years. The immediate outcome of the recent clash between Israel and Iran was totally unexpected and portends uncertainty:

The destruction of Israel is in full swing. The reconstruction of partially destroyed Israel (Tel Aviv, ports, airports and arms factories) will take years, but requires that the ceasefire holds, which is completely uncertain as the protagonists are behaving so unreliably. This will result in the owners concerned not putting up any money in the current situation. Would you rebuild an office building if there was a 50% chance that it would be destroyed again tomorrow?

What will the future bring? And what kind of consent will be manufactured to justify it?

I think Jacques Baud nails it!!

This is the key part...



"Israel has become a liability" (to the West) ~~Jacques Baud.

Once you finish hearing this segment, go back and listen to Jacques Baud's entire talk from the beginning. You will be rewarded with what is arguably profound insight.

If indeed Israel became a liability to the West, following the events of October 7th, 2023, then Hamas rolled a 7 or 11 on that critical "throw of the dice":



...And a postscript, of sorts on Iran.

The Unfolding Middle East War

Alastair W. Crooke CMG is a former British diplomat, and was a ranking figure in both British intelligence (MI6) and the European Union. Historically, MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States have worked in close collaboration: "The close ties between the CIA and British MI6 were evident in Iran where CIA coup master Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., worked closely with MI6 to coordinate the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had tried to nationalize Iran’s oil industry." He expounds on the current unfolding Middle East War.



If the above video is taken down, you can access the audio of the interview with Alastair W. Crooke HERE.

+ + +

...But wait a minute, haven't we been here before?

Trump has backed himself into a corner. The self-imagined dealmaker sincerely believed that by applying economic pressure on Iran, backed up with the threat of force, the Iranian government would come to the negotiation table and agree to a nuclear deal that denied it everything it had achieved through diplomacy with the Obama administration. Trump believed he could bully America’s allies in Europe to go along with him. And, in the end, when he asked his military leaders to provide him with options to forcefully compel Iran to bend to his will, Trump was told that nothing short of an all-out war, involving more than 500,000 troops, could provide the outcome he sought, and even then only at great cost. Trump had run on a platform that promised an end to costly wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. If he pulled the trigger on Iran, his chances of reelection in 2020 would be all but eliminated.

+ + +

As a way of widening the historical context to this war, it is important to note that said conflict transcends any particular US administration. As General Wesley Clark once admitted in public, this war turns out to be merely the latest in a string of seven planned Middle Eastern wars since the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

Instead of giving a comprehensive history of the lead-up to the current Iran war, suffice it to say that around three years ago, the stage was being set. On 14 July 2022, then US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid signed a document called the Jerusalem US-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, indicating the US would use all of its “national power” to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. I would furthermore argue that additional events underlay and eventually accentuated the urgency for the USA to "take down" Iran.

Around the same time the US-Israeli Joint Declaration was being signed in Jerusalem, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Tehran for a summit with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. According to analyst Patrick Lawrence,

...the centerpiece of the occasion was a simultaneous memorandum of understanding signed by the National Iranian Oil Company and Gazprom. In an agreement worth $40 billion, the Russian energy supplier is to assist on the technology side as Iran develops two gas fields and six oil fields. Further out, this is part of a long-in-the-making project that will connect Russia, Iran, and India by sea, road, rail, and, eventually, a very significant Iran–to–India gas pipeline.

It is noteworthy that by this time China had already signed a 25–year, hundreds of billions dollar agreement with Iran which included tech transfer, infrastructure development, oil sales, and so on — that had been years in gestation. Needless to say, the prospect of Eurasian integration struck terror into the heart of the United States:

The [International North-South Transport Corridor] INSTC was announced back in the early 2000s, but progress was slow until recently when the West’s actions put it into overdrive. The sanctioning of Moscow and Tehran and the severing of Europe from Russian energy created the incentive to accelerate investments by key stakeholders. The authorities in Tehran realize their centrality on the India-Russia trade route, and considering that India’s imports from Russia quadrupled last year, one can deduct the potential upside for Iran. With an investment boost from Russia, Tehran has been trying to speed up the completion of improved railway networks that will connect to the existing railways of Russia and Azerbaijan and Chabahar Port in southeastern Iran.

+ + +

Postscript

So what are we to make of this new Middle East War? As I (and others) have stated before, this new phase of jingoism accompanied by rank xenophobia we are experiencing in the West is part and parcel of a declining US empire:

There is a certain cadence to decline, a rhythm of arrogance and desperation, of miscalculation and delusion. The late-stage empire, unmoored from reality yet clinging to myths of its own indispensability, lashes out at perceived threats not because they are real, but because it cannot conceive of a world in which it is no longer the gravitational centre of history. In this way, Russophobia and Sinophobia function not merely as ideological constructs, but as symptoms of systemic decay, the fever dreams of a civilisation struggling to process its own obsolescence.

Unfortunately, the US empire doesn't seem to want to go quietly into the night. Hopefully, Iran's preparations over the years for this current conflict will help it emerge victorious.

Disjointed Musings about my First Decade of Travel to China

Wow! I can't believe it has been just over ten years since I first traveled to China. My first trip was in 2014: On 20 August, I presented a research paper at the China Goes Global Conference at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. Following the conference, I promptly went on a tour to all the typical tourist hotspots one visits on a first trip to that wonderful country. That is me (in the back with a black cap with red lettering) surrounded by a fine group of multinational tourists prior to the customary trek up the Great Wall.

The next photo was taken of me standing next to Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Gate.

One very interesting albeit minor occurrence oddly (or perhaps not) remains engraved in my mind although it had virtually little or nothing to do with my tour, or with China at all. This merits a brief digression. Those who follow major geopolitical events of this century may notice the coincidence of the year of my visit to China with the "Maidan Revolution" which took place in Ukraine (The Maidan coup had occurred several months earlier in February). Said coup unleashed a series of events that included the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, and marked the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which continues to this day.

Throughout my entire touristic journey in China, I was closely following the events unfolding in Ukraine as best I could (I was particularly pleased that I could access the online blog of the late United States Army officer and private intelligence analyst, and author, Col.Walter Patrick "Pat" Lang, Jr.. On one occasion our group was travelling on the tour-bus through Beijing and the topic of the Ukraine conflict came up. I was suprised by how our Chinese tourguide (a fine young fellow with an inquisitive mind) had accepted without questioning the western narrative of (largely) misinformation regarding Russia's alleged "actions" in the Ukraine conflict. When his words contradicted the authoritative analysis I had read of Col. Lang and others, I interrupted and corrected him. Astonished at how I came up with information that contradicted his own, he naturally asked me for the source and I responded (to his further amazement) that Col. Lang was a graduate of:

...the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the Armed Forces Staff College. He ... [was] a decorated veteran of several of the United States' overseas conflicts. During the Vietnam War, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and Military Intelligence. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East and served in that region for many years. He was the first professor of Arabic at the United States Military Academy,...

My intrigued Chinese tourguide asked for more information and I immediatedly provided him with the URLs for several entries to Col. Lang's blog, including the background to NATO expansion, the devious role and origins of the National Endowment for Democracy, the 'dark' origins of influential West Ukrainian nationalists, and a contrast between the opinions of propagandists and actual scholars, among others.

Now here is an interesting detail I always hark back to: In those days, Col. Lang had a blog app that highlighted the geographic location of people accessing his blog entries (via little dots of light on a world map) utilizing visitor tracking widgets and map integrations. When I first entered China, I noticed there were no "dots of light" within Chinese territory on Col. Lang's blog app (except one single dot of light corresponding to me!), which meant that nobody in China knew who Col. Lang was or accessed his blog. Most of his readers were either from Europe, the Americas or the Middle East (and Japan). HOWEVER, in the ensuing days after I gave my Chinese tourguide the abovementioned URL's, there suddenly appeared half a dozen highlights from Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities in China!! I can only surmise that my inquisitive tourguide had spread the word far and wide (knowingly or unknowingly), and that there was a growing interest in a different (and authoritative) depiction of the Ukraine conflict within China.

End of my digression!

My last trip to China was in December of 2024. There had been a number of other excursions previous to that one which included this place (can you guess the name of this famous river?):

...and this place (can you guess the name of this snow-covered peak?):

However, there are just too many places to mention at once.

I was reminded of a particular encounter during last December's trip to Dali in Yunnan Province while reading up on some current trends in international economics and commerce. I'm talking about the BRICS:

The BRICS countries have established Hong Kong as the most important financial center in their new system, while HK's banks also serve as a conduit between China's factory sector and the rest of the world. The new BRICS economy, ironically, still uses dollars as the primary medium of exchange between member countries, while completely bypassing the US and SWIFT-regulated financial systems.

Actually, why read it if you can (better) watch a video?


In the second half of the video, Mr. Walmsley noted:

Tether bought 8,888 bitcoin. Eight is a lucky number in China. Chinese pay a high premium to have a lot of 8’s in their phone number, or on their car license plate. It’s especially important in Chinese culture for their home address. These are the three lucky numbers, and why, and 8 relates to fortune.

That statement prodded me to look through my photo collection from Dali. I found the photo I was looking for:

No! Not that one! That is me in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

YES! That's it! That structure is part of the Chongsheng Temple in Dali. You know whose statue is inside? Cai Shen, the Chinese God of Wealth, who is often associated with the number eight. The number eight is considered lucky in Chinese culture, and "888 Cai Shen" is a term used to amplify the promise of prosperity and abundance. Meet Cai Shen:

Feeling Lucky, yet? Well, I do.

More on the "Transition" to a New World Order

This is a further follow-up to my previous two posts, The US Dollar as Global Reserve Currency and its implications for the United States TODAY! and More on the Trump Tariff Wars. This post is perhaps best described as a distillation or summary of what I posted earlier, thus if you would like more detail, please refer to my previous posts.

As you will immediately note, this isn't a post of mine as much as it is a plug for an article entitled 'Transition' to a New World Order Is Beyond Most in the West, by the renown geopolitical analyst Alastair Crooke. I do this because social media tends to censor The Unz Review, the alternative media where Mr. Crooke's articles are often published. Although Crooke headlines his article with the phrase The new era marks the end to ‘old politics’, it is changes to the world economic order which I am more interested in. (Since Crooke makes reference to the "financialisation" of the economy over the years, an excellent background reference to that can be obtained via economist Michael Hudson).

I first would draw attention to the excellent quote by the the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker Jr., which Alastair Crooke inserts near the beginning of his article (Please go to the link and read it for yourself). Further on, Crooke writes:

The dollar-led globalist system worked well initially – at least from the U.S. perspective. The U.S. exported its post-WW2 manufacturing over-capacity to a newly dollarized Europe, who consumed the surplus. And Europe too, enjoyed the benefit of having its macroeconomic environment (export-led models, guaranteed by the U.S. market). The present crisis began however, when the paradigm inverted – when the U.S. entered on its era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, and when financialisation led Wall Street to build its inverted pyramid of derivative ‘assets’, resting upon a tiny pivot of real assets.

Perhaps the last quote I will extract from Mr. Crooke's article is the following:

It is because of this western deep devotion to ideology (as well as to the Volker ‘comfort’ provided by the system) that has triggered such a torrent of anger and outright derision towards Trump’s ‘rebalancing’ plans. Barely a western economist has a good word to say – and yet no plausible alternative framework is offered. Their passion directed at Trump simply underlines that western economic theory is bankrupt, too.

Go and read the entire article. The message I would like to transmit out of this is that it is pure fantasy to think that the removal of US president Donald Trump will somehow permit the restoration of the US economy to its prior state, something like the restoration of the original operating system of your PC once it has been hopelessly corrupted. We are in a new world, ladies and gentlemen, and the sooner we realize it the better.

More on the Trump Tariff Wars

This post is meant as a follow-up to my previous one titled The US Dollar as Global Reserve Currency and its implications for the United States TODAY! (Note: if you aren't an economist, you might want to go there first and view the short introductory video titled "Why Is the U.S. Dollar So Popular Around the World?").

This document was written by Stephen Miran, the economist behind Trump's tariff policies. I'm still in the process of reading it since it is an obligatory assignment for any academic economist that is teaching these days. Granted, it is a bit wonkish for the layman, but I'll just draw your attention to a few statements in the introduction to the first chapter. Like most other significant economic policy changes (and this is one of the most significant so far this century), its effectiveness inevitably requires the implementation of a series of ancillary or "supporting" measures. This is where it gets a bit dicey.

For example, Miran states (emphasis in caps is mine):

President Trump has also discussed adopting SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES TO DOLLAR POLICY. Sweeping tariffs and a shift away from strong dollar policy can have some of the broadest ramifications of any policies in decades, fundamentally reshaping the global trade and financial systems. There is A PATH BY WHICH THESE POLICIES CAN BE IMPLEMENTED WITHOUT MATERIAL ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES, BUT IT IS NARROW, and will require currency offset for tariffs and either gradualism or coordination with allies or the Federal Reserve on the dollar. POTENTIAL FOR UNWELCOME ECONOMIC AND MARKET VOLATILITY IS SUBSTANTIAL, BUT THERE ARE STEPS THE ADMINISTRATION CAN TAKE TO MINIMIZE IT.

Hmmmmm, what are these measures, I wonder?🤔 As I alluded to in my previous post, the US needs to end the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency (to me as an economist, it seems as the only plausible alternative but it would mean that the USA wouldn't be able to have access to cheap money to finance its wars, ... err, I mean its "expenditures"🙄). Since I am profoundly anti-war, I would like nothing less than for the USA to be unable to finance its overseas imperialist wars, so I would favor ending dollar supremacy, hands down. However, does Trump want to do that? Of course not! He wants to have his cake and eat it too:

Trump has praised the reserve status of the dollar and threatened to punish countries that stop using the dollar for reserve purposes.

OK, so what are you going to do, Mr. Trump, in order to ensure the continued supremacy of the US dollar?🧐 The document continues:

I expect these tensions will be resolved by a suite of policies designed to increase burden sharing among trading and security partners: rather than attempting to end the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency.

What exactly does Miran mean (or might Trump mean) by those seemingly anodyne words? They mean Trump is going to force countries to PAY the US tribute to maintain its global financial and military empire! So, let me get this straight. The USA is going to ask a country like, say, China, to pay it funds so it can wage war against China? Good luck with that.

Regarding China in particular, there are good reasons to believe it is in a much better position to weather Trump's tariff wars. Better than even the United States! To this effect, I would highly recommend the worthwhile round-up by the very competent journalist Helena Cobban, titled China displays its chops in tech, mil-tech, manufacturing– and even political philosophy…. You might also want to check out an earlier interview with Columbia U. economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The US Dollar as Global Reserve Currency and its implications for the United States TODAY!

I've taught international economics at the graduate level and can attest to the difficulties one has as a teacher in effectively conveying how this convoluted system works to students. However, in order to understand the implications of Trump's policies, you have no choice but to (try to) learn something about the system. A good place for the layman to start is with the following introductory video:



You can find a transcript of the above video HERE.

Along with American professor of finance Michael Pettis of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, I believe that “Both the United States and the world at large would benefit from a less dominant U.S. dollar”, although I have my own reasons. You can find Prof. Pettis's work cited in THIS article (scroll down to the heading Are there costs to dollar dominance?).

What about President Donald Trump's current tariff policies, which seem to have the world in such a state of chaos? I came across the following "tweet" by an economist the other day: {the} US tariff agenda is basically designed to cause a negotiated dollar weakening; (now WH chief economist), gave a speech yesterday which basically suggested that reserve status for dollar was a burden which others might need to 'write checks' for. Intrigued, I did an online search which turned up THIS article on the Trump administration's tariffs and currency policy. Aside from my personal animus toward the militarism of the United States, the supremacy of the US dollar is counterproductive if the intention is to bring back manufacturing investment to the USA. Economist Simon Tilford and researcher Hans Kundnani are succinct in their aptly titled article for Foreign Affairs:

Dollar hegemony ... has domestic distributional consequences - that is, it creates winners and losers within the USA. The main winners are the banks which act as intermediaries and recipients of the capital inflows and that exercise excessive influence over US economic policy. The losers are the manufacturers and the workers they employ. Demand for the dollar pushes up its value, which makes US exports more expensive and curtails demand for them abroad, thus leading to earnings and job losses in manufacturing. The costs have been borne disproportionately by swing states in regions such as the rust-belt - a consequence that in turn has deepened socioeconomic divisions and fueled political polarization. Manufacturing jobs that were once central to the economies of these regions have been offshored, leaving poverty and resentment in their wake. It is little surprise that many of the hardest-hit states voted for Trump in 2016.

Despite being behind a pay-wall the entire Foreign Affairs article is worthwhile. It was published in 2020 and is prescient, giving badly needed context to what is happening today. Further on it states:

The domestic costs of accumulating large capital flows are likely to increase and become more destabilizing for the US in the future. As China and other emerging economies continue to grow and the US's slice of the global economy continues to shrink, capital inflows to the US will grow relative to the size of the US economy (...) Given these mounting economic and political pressures, it will become increasingly difficult for the US to create more balanced and equitable growth while remaining the destination of choice for the world's excess capital, with the overvalued currency and deindustrialization this implies. At some point, the US will have little alternative but to limit capital imports in the interests of the broader economy - even if doing so means voluntarily giving up the dollar's role as the world's dominant reserve currency.

If you would prefer avoid the pay-wall, perhaps the following video will be more to your liking. It takes on the issue of President Trump's tariffs head-on:



A more "bricks and mortar" treatment of the topic of the difficulties of enticing manufacturing back to the United States is provided by Molson Hart, the founder and CEO of Viahart, a consumer products company, HERE.

Of Tariff Wars and Peace Talks, with Economist Jeffrey Sachs

If you listen to anything this year, make sure it is THIS:



For further insights, read why the US will ultimately be unable to return much manufacturing to within its borders.

Dr Jan Oberg - The West is Militarising Itself to Death

Jan Oberg. Jan is a sociologist, peace researcher, the director of Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research.



I couldn't have said it better!

Building the New World Order

Much to the chagrin of the western establishment, the way of the future is being articulated by this man:

"We have consistently underscored the diversity of the world as a prerequisite for its sustainability. It may appear paradoxical, as greater diversity complicates the construction of a unified narrative. Naturally, universal norms are presumed to aid in this regard. Can they fulfill this role? It stands to reason that this is a formidable and complicated task. Firstly, we must avoid a scenario where the model of one country or a relatively minute segment of humanity is presumed universal and imposed upon others. Secondly, it is untenable to adopt any conventional, albeit democratically developed code, and dictate it as an infallible truth to others in perpetuity. The international community is a living entity, with its civilisational diversity making it unique and presenting an inherent value. International law is a product of agreements not even between countries, but between nations, because legal consciousness is an integral part of every unique culture and every civilisation. The crisis of international law, which is the subject of broad public discussion today, is, in a sense, a crisis of growth. The rise of nations and cultures that have previously remained on the periphery of global politics for one reason or another means that their own distinct ideas of law and justice are playing an increasingly important role. They are diverse. This may give the impression of discord and perhaps cacophony, but this is only the initial phase. It is my deep conviction that the only new international system possible is one embracing polyphony, where many tones and many musical themes are sounded together to form harmony. If you like, we are moving towards a world system that is going to be polyphonic rather than polycentric, one in which all voices are heard and, most importantly, absolutely must be heard. Those who are used to soloing and want to keep it that way will have to get used to the new 'scores' now. Have I mentioned post-WWII international law? This international law is based on the UN Charter, which was written by the victorious countries. But the world is changing – with new centres of power emerging, and powerful economies growing and coming to the forefront. That predictably calls for a change in the legal regulation as well. Of course, this must be done carefully, but it is inevitable. Law reflects life, not vice versa."

Enter the BRICS+. The recent Kazan Summit is indeed a watershed, but there is disagreement over what was intended and what was achieved. The following video will go a long way toward clarifying these issues. In it, political economist Radhika Desai is joined by Ben Norton and former central banker Kathleen Tyson, author of the book "Multicurrency Mercantilism" to explain BRICS's plans to transform the international monetary and financial system, and to discuss policies at the 2024 summit in Kazan, Russia.:



By the way, Youtube has the bad habit of censoring taking down inconvenient videos. If that happens in this case, the audio of said video can easily be accessed here.