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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-009
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Biden admin:
Counter Biden admin:
Iran:
Covid-19 Politics:
Longreads:
Use as open thread …
Corroborates with my opinion:
Top Chinese Academic Predicts America Will Face British Empire-Style Decline
“Great empires experience three stages: prosperity, stagnation, and decline. The decline of the United States does not shock or surprise me. The question is in how it will take place. For many years, the United Kingdom was the most powerful nation in the world; its decline was long and lasted for several decades. The Soviet Union shattered like a glass that fell on the floor. I believe the decline of the United States is more likely to follow the British scenario,” the academic said.
Although, his metaphor doesn’t exactly match his conclusion, as we can see when he develops his idea:
“The presidential elections, the storming of the Capitol, and above all the reaction to the latter event have accelerated this trend. Trump’s Twitter account was even blocked. This means that other opinions are not tolerated in America,” he said. “In China, more and more people believe that America is moving toward a political system in which each successive president might put his predecessor in jail,” the scholar added.
Of course that, being the direct successor of the British Empire, it is more sensible to predict the fall of the American Empire will look more like the British case than anything else. Both are capitalist empires, after all.
However, his example reminds us more the Roman Empire’s case than the British Empire; the British had one institution that further decentralized an already decentralized economic system, which is the Crown. This prevented the British high bureaucracy from eating itself to collapse. The USA has a much more centralized institution that feeds power struggle at the top – the White House – which resembles much more the Imperial Office of the ancient Roman Empire when talking about collapse patterns.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t hope the USA to follow the British case, as the British Empire went out with a bang – the two World Wars, both of which it was the main cause. My opinion is nukes will (hopefully) stop the American Empire from following the British example, but it is plausible humanity really is going to be extinct by a nuclear fallout caused by the Americans.
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@ Posted by: oldhippie | Feb 1 2021 20:55 utc | 177
Oops. I mixed the names. What we nowadays call the capitalist reforms of England went until at least the two Charleses (I and II), not Edward (predecessors to Henry VIII). I never gave much effort in memorizing names and dates of the British kings and queens – mostly because they’re irrelevant in the great scheme of things.
The rest of my analysis is correct, though.
Indeed, the historical fact that feudalism “sleepwalked” to capitalism was noted by one of the famous bolshevik thinkers – Yevgeny Preobrazhensky – who, in his “New Economy”, stated that the great difficulty of the communist revolution would be to do the economic revolution after the political revolution, when capitalism had experienced the easy route of already being a fact of life when the feudal aristocracy realized they were losing political power.
And it’s true. In fact, all the systems up to capitalism arose through very long and gradual reforms, implemented without the dominant classes’ consciousness they were hanging themselves. The October Revolution was the first one that was scientific in its nature, i.e. according to a plan drawn out of a scientific theory (Marxism).
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Good news for the German people, even if by accident:
As EU falls behind on supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, German health minister entertains possibility of using Russia’s Sputnik V
I watched an interview with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, and he told the interviewer Venezuela was going to use mainly the Sputnik V. It was already tested and not only showed an 100% efficacy, but without any collateral effects (so far, he stressed).
The Germans are dodging a bullet here.
Posted by: vk | Feb 1 2021 22:08 utc | 180
And here we have today’s Alastair Crooke:
“In America, the belief however, is that the ‘motor’ to its ‘real’ economy has died (its demise, exacerbated, but not caused, by Covid). It has been succeeded by shards of newly imagined financialised and tech resets, scattered throughout élite clusters.
“The change has been shocking in its scope, and in the stealth by which it has crept upon us: Asset markets have been severed from any connection to economic returns; valuations in the billions no longer require to be underpinned by any profit at all. Price discovery via market interaction no longer exists. Markets are not free, but Treasury managed; enterprise capitalism is morphed into monopolistic oligarchism; innovation and small businesses have been crushed; inequality is rampant; money printing and debt are no longer limited by any prudent considerations, but rather as an exciting MMT ‘opportunity’ ahead; and interest rates no longer act as the mechanism by which capital is directed to its most effective and productive use. It is a complete paradigm change.” [My Emphasis]
As Max said, genuine Capitalism within the Outlaw US Empire is now dead. Crooke continues:
“The point here is that this dynamic has become hegemonic – there is no escape. However sceptical one may be about its illusory foundations, any attempt by the Authorities to restrain it is likely to make it crash. Global central banks will not – cannot – countenance a market crash. No, they must take this newly imagined MMT ‘reality’ to its furthest limit, and bear the consequences, which may be ill-starred. The madness will continue. We are in a new world in which we are obliged to act as though we are somehow ‘rational amidst the irrational’, until the fever subsides.” [My Emphasis]
Or until the “fever” gets Reset. And ominously, here’s Crooks again:
“But what if U.S. politics (and not just economics) is entering into a similar hegemonic dynamic, a framework which, however irrational some may judge it to be, simply cannot be escaped – trapping Americans into its institutional structures as tightly as the economy now is trapped by its’ financialist cage?”
Too bad it’s so huge that all the players can’t simply be rounded up, placed into padded cells and sentenced to Life. One might say Crooke’s become a Hudson or Keiser enthusiast, although one only needed to be open-eyed and unbiased with a strong moral grounding. Crooke again:
“When Ray Dalio, the well-known Davos devotee, and CIO of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest investment fund, in recent days suggested that, “We [America] are on the brink of a terrible civil war”, ZeroHedge (a leading U.S. financial web-site), reminded Dalio that more than a decade ago, it had warned, even then, that the Fed’s unconstrained monetary lunacy (Quantitative Easing) would eventually result in civil war – a prediction for which ZeroHedge was much mocked at the time.
“Yet it was prescient. The kick-the-can, debt-led response to the 2008 financial crisis of rolling-over ever larger mountains of debt (‘printing’ more money/debt) at zero interest rates, has been responsible for a massive transfer of purchasing power from the 60% to the 1%; responsible for gaping wealth inequalities; for the concentration of the economic means (and political power) in the hands of the oligarchy – in tandem with the incrementally growing stultification of the ‘deplorable’ sector of the economy. In ZeroHedge’s words of that time, this sector of the American public was being ‘thrown under the bus by the Federal Reserve’.
“In short, the rise of the Deplorable constituency – associated with Trumpism – is not the cause of today’s crisis, but its symptom. ZeroHedge challenges Dalio to admit this truth.”
But to be completely honest, the Outlaw US Empire has always been very unbalanced socio-economically going back to its inception. The stats show the great decoupling that led to today’s craziness began when Nixon said the USA will no longer operate its economy on sound money, which opened the doors for the Neoliberal Parasites to invade and take over since no actual study of economics was happening–they just said it was and employed Enron Accounting decades earlier than realized. Then there’s the cultural side of the exploding myth that Crooke goes on to investigate:
“Then to the other part to the American myth, which is cultural and political: And precisely here is where another seemingly small strategic decision has triggered a quite separate political dynamic – one that also threatens to become a hegemonic spider’s web from which escape is near impossible.
“Just as the financial world’s interests and fortunes are tied to not kicking over the hornets’ nest of a catastrophic monetary policy (because it is anyway too late to reverse it), so too, politico-demographic fortunes are tied to not allowing kicking at the hornets’ nest of an identity and gender politics – one committed to the notion of equity, rather than equality in society.”
The problem was recognized by Billie Holiday in 1939 which she immortalized in God Bless The Child, although we should probably thank her mother for holding the values that generated the friction that led to the lyrics and the song. But its certain her mother was merely repeating the wisdom of The Ever Fonkey Lowdown’s Mister Game.
I can only hope The Outlaw US Empire will peacefully take its medicine; and once it recovers, is willing to rejoin humanity as an equal, not as anything exceptional.
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 2 2021 0:49 utc | 194
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