No es que lo exteriorice de manera idéntica a la época de Hitler, pero en Alemania se están dando fehacientes muestras de que el nazi-fascismo continúa estando vivo en las estructuras del Estado (lo mismo que el franquismo en las del Estado español).
Este se muestra según las necesidades de sus beneficiarios (el gran capital) y las circunstancias. En este caso concreto nos estamos refiriendo a la actuación policial alemana contra una persona. Esta vestía una camiseta con la bandera palestina impresa; la policía lo detuvo por este hecho.
Esto no es salvaguardar el orden ni ninguna otra escusa habitualmente utilizada por los uniformados para reprimir, siempre amparados por el Estado. Esto es un ejercicio indudablemente nazi-fascista.
Another month of hostilities in Ukraine is coming to its end. July of 2024 brought important tactical victories to the Russian army. Over the last month, Russian forces took control of one of the largest areas since the beginning of the year. The advance of the Russian army is comparable to the gains made in the spring of 2022.
The Russian military maintains the military initiative and continues offensive operations along the entire frontline, preventing the Armed Forces of Ukraine from accumulating large reserves in any one direction.
After the Russian army launched an offensive in the Kharkiv region and contained large Ukrainian forces near the border, it managed to achieve major territorial gains in the Donbass. The Pokrovsk direction, where the Ukrainian defense cannot stop crumbling, remains one of the most dangerous areas for the Ukrainian military. At the same time, the ongoing Russian attacks are bringing gains in other areas as well.
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Kyiv’s patrons in Washington are finishing this month with new dangerous gifts. The United States has announced another $200 million worth of military assistance to Ukraine.
The Americans paid special attention to the supply of anti-aircraft missiles for medium and short-range air defense systems, a serious shortage of which the Armed Forces of Ukraine are currently suffering. Russian reconnaissance drones that are coordinating the strikes and are targeting various bombs and missiles at strategically important Ukrainian facilities operating without any obstacles over the Ukrainian rear cities.
Kyiv’s other Western friends are also escalating the threat of a major military escalation. Poland announced a number of military operations to begin on August 1. In particular, the air operation called Eastern Dawn and Safe Podlachia overland operation will be launched in the eastern and southeastern parts of the country. These are not exercises, but military operations that allegedly have defensive goals. In fact, the Polish military is preparing for an escalation of the Ukrainian conflict, which may spread to NATO territory. Moreover, Warsaw is ready to ignite it.
Warsaw signed a joint defense agreement with Ukraine. The Poles were willing to shot down Russian missiles and declared their readiness to provide their airfields to deploy the F-16 fighters gifted to Ukraine by NATO. The Kremlin warned that the Ukrainian F-16 bases will become legitimate targets for Russian strikes.
In July, numerous flights of F-16 air groups of NATO countries in the airspace bordering Ukraine were recorded. Some flights were carried out with transponders turned off. NATO aircraft increased operations at airfields in Poland and Romania, including at night. An operational game on the covert transfer of F-16 aircraft to the Air Force of Ukraine has been held near the Ukrainian border.
Presumably, NATO is preparing to launch an air operation in Ukraine, and the Polish Air Force gets ready to enter the war.
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Anyone who knows anything about missile technology is perfectly aware that Russia is one of the pioneers in this field of military science. Moscow is not only developing and making the world’s best rockets and missiles, but it’s also second-to-none in terms of their usage. Namely, the Kremlin’s doctrine on using long-range strike capabilities is virtually without equal, as it has been leading the world in this regard since the 1950s. After the unfortunate dismantling of the USSR, Russia lost a decade’s worth of research and development in various fields of military high technologies, also losing the precious advantage it had over its adversaries. However, rocket science isn’t one of those, resulting in the development of some of the best and most advanced missile systems even during that period. This included everything from ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles) to advanced ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles).
One of the missile systems that was developed during the troubled 1990s is the now legendary “Iskander”. This highly advanced, modular rocket complex (as it’s known in Russian military nomenclature) is arguably the world’s first land-based hypersonic missile platform. Due to its modularity, the 9K720 “Iskander” system has two variants. The first is the “Iskander-M”, armed with the advanced 9M723 quasi-ballistic/hypersonic missiles capable of massive speeds of up to Mach 8.7 and reaching a range of up to 500 km (due to INF Treaty limitations).
Most Western sources classify it as an SRBM (short-range ballistic missile), albeit it’s far more advanced than a regular ballistic missile. The second is the “Iskander-K”, modified to launch cruise missiles such as the 9M728 (essentially the R-500, with a range of up to 500 km) and the Novator’s 9M729 (which Western sources claim has a staggering range of up to 5,500 km).
The most commonly used variant of the missile system is the “Iskander-M” with the 9M723, which has a massive warhead weighing up to 700 kg. It has various types of payloads, including high-explosive fragmentation, submunition, penetration, EMP (electromagnetic pulse), and last but not least, thermonuclear with a yield of up to 50 kt. Due to its high precision, extreme maneuverability and hypersonic speed, the missile is one of the deadliest in the world and is virtually impossible to intercept, as evidenced by its performance during the SMO (special military operation). The “Iskander-M” gives Russia a significant advantage over NATO forces in Eastern Europe and, as of recently, Scandinavia, where the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel is expanding the scope of its crawling aggression. However, the missile is particularly frightening to the Neo-Nazi junta and NATO personnel in Ukraine.
On July 23, military sources reported that a massive munitions storage was destroyed in Nikolayev, while dozens of NATO and Kiev regime personnel were wiped out after their hideout was located in the town of Dergachi in the Kharkov oblast (region). According to military reports, at least 50 NATO operators were obliterated, including nationals from the United States, United Kingdom, Georgia and several other countries. The political West is having trouble hiding such losses, as now even NATO officers themselves are talking about it. For instance, retired Spanish Army Colonel Pedro Bagnos reports that 18 British Special Air Service (SAS) operators, as well as their French counterparts, were neutralized in a single Russian strike on their base of operations in Odessa, with at least another 25 of the SAS members wounded. Official reports are scant, but military sources indicate that this was precisely the “Iskander-M’s” doing.
A day earlier, on July 22, the Russian military published a video showing the destruction of a large warehouse packed with various NATO-sourced weapons and munitions, including the overhyped HIMARS. The strike was conducted by the “Iskander-M”, hitting the area of Novopetrovka in the Nikolayev oblast. This operation was part of the wider hunt for US/NATO-made MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) such as the HIMARS and M270/MARS, as well as the ATACMS TBMs (tactical ballistic missiles) that these systems can fire. A day before, on July 21, another report surfaced about an “Iskander-M” obliterating a large group of enemy personnel in the DPR. The footage shows the destruction of around 240 troops (including foreigners) and over 60 pieces of equipment. The report mentioned the Neo-Nazi junta’s 41st Mechanized Brigade near Barvenkovo in the border area between the DPR and Kharkov oblast.
A week earlier, another “Iskander-M” strike neutralized a military train in the small town of Budy in Kharkov oblast. The strike soon turned into a double tap after which more hostile personnel were eliminated. First reports about the strike were published on July 14. Just three days earlier, on July 11, military sources reported on the “Iskander-M” destroying two batteries of the grossly overhyped “Patriot” SAM (surface-to-air missile) system. The Russian military reported that the NATO-sourced weapon was stationed near the settlement of Yuzhnoye in the Odessa oblast. Earlier, on July 8, another “Iskander-M” strike destroyed a military column of the Neo-Nazi junta forces in the Sumy oblast. Military sources report that the column was detected near Stetskovka, in the relative vicinity of the city of Sumy, after which 20 vehicles and up to 65 enemy personnel were neutralized. Local sources suggest that this unit also had a number of foreign personnel.
On the same day, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) released footage of the simultaneous destruction of three US-made HIMARS systems. The NATO-sourced weapons were located in a forested area close to Klapaya in the Kherson oblast. The Russian MoD noted that up to a dozen foreigners were eliminated, stressing that these crews were most likely responsible for the terrorist attack on beachgoers in Sevastopol, preventing another strike with the US-made ATACMS missiles. Earlier in July, an “Iskander-M” also obliterated several aircraft in the Mirgorod Air Base in central Poltava oblast, located around 250 km from the border. At least four Su-27 fighter jets were destroyed. The last days of June also saw stellar usage of the “Iskander-M” against the HIMARS and similar systems in Yasenovoe in the DPR and Shevchenkove in the Nikolayev oblast. Video footage shows that at least 20 and 25 enemy troops were neutralized in both areas.
It should be noted that the “Iskander” is not the most capable hypersonic weapon in the Russian arsenal, as there are also the “Zircon” and “Kinzhal” missiles. In the last two years, Moscow drastically expanded the production of these missiles, while there are indicators that it’s also procuring more affordable North Korean copies. The “Iskander-M” itself is a more cost-effective alternative to newer missiles and is regularly augmented by the “Tornado-S” MLRS. The Kiev regime has been unable to locate (let alone reach) the areasfrom which these systems are used, making them the most effective widely-deployed long-range strike platforms in the Russian military. They are particularly efficient when used in combination with military intel and advanced ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets, giving the Kremlin unprecedented strike capabilities, a terrifying prospect for any foreign personnel in Ukraine and beyond.
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It has been a few heady months in the epic battle to end the slaughter in Gaza. College students launched protests in support of the Palestinians at Harvard, Colombia, Berkeley, UCLA and elsewhere in defiance of the college administrations. The Green Party candidate Jill Stein was arrested at a protest and the alternative media tells us that the anti-war movement is spreading like wildfire. And now, in response to South Africa’s formal charges of genocide, the International Court of Justice has issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Now the Democrats face a “never Biden” insurgency, will be forced to rethink its support for the Israeli assault on Gaza, and even embrace a “ceasefire.”
One cannot help but be caught up in the excitement of what appears to be a revival of the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, and even start humming nostalgically Crosby Stills and Nash’s “Four Dead in Ohio.”
And yet, something is not right with this picture. As soon as arrest warrant for Netanyahu is issued, he is invited to address both houses of the US Congress in July in what could well be a declaration of war on Iran.
Note that the protests are fueled by the microscopic reporting in the New York Times and Washington Post, and other establishment media, of the operations of the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza: killings of individual families, attacks on hospitals and marketplaces, and cruelties at border crossings are described in detail.
But let us remember that those same journals were silent about murder of hundreds of thousands in Iraq (most of which took place without a single photograph anywhere), accepted at face value the ridiculously low numbers for American soldiers killed in these foreign wars, and asked no questions about the mysterious absence of American prisoners of war. Nor are those newspapers, or most of the alternative media protesters quote, discussing the brutal special operations of the United States in Haiti, throughout South America, and in Africa, let alone reporting on the horrific treatment of Americans held in prisons (where they are beaten, attacked by dogs, tortured, drugged, and murdered) which reaches a cruelty equal to that shown for Palestinians. The role of Israeli military and intelligence contractors like Elbit Systems or Magal Security Systems in all of those horror shows is completely ignored even by the most anti-war media sources.
The narrative advanced by the students opposing the Gaza massacre relates how Israeli soldiers are cruel to Palestinians because their minds are possessed by a racist, apartheid ideology. True though this tale may be in the narrow sense, the resulting debate excludes any discussion of international class conflict (how the extreme concentration of wealth has led the billionaires to fund experiments in using extreme brutality against working people for which the slow division of Palestine with walls, and the use of the military to control all infrastructure, is a trial run), the control of capital (Israel’s role as a clearinghouse for a new generation of private equity merged with IT giants like Google, Oracle, and Apple who are using digitalization and “AI” as a means to seize control of literally everything) or technology (how the surveillance, social control, disinformation campaigns, and tracking and intelligence convergence programs run by satellites, robots, and drones are being developed in Israel for use against all of us—not just Palestinians).
The more carefully you look at the actions taken by the IDF in Gaza, the less sense they make as strategy or policy for the citizens of Israel. The resulting anger at Israel around the world, and in the United States, makes Israel’s citizens far less safe and drastically reduces their options. In fact, the Netanyahu administration is bending over backwards to cultivate relations with antisemitic groups.
As we know from the close friendship of Kurt Tuchler of the Zionist Federation of Germany with Leopold von Mildenstein of Jewish Desk at the security service of the SS, in Zionist politics, antisemitism is good for business.
The attacks in Gaza are carried out in slow motion and broadcast to the entire world through the mainstream news in spite of the strangle hold of Israel lobbyists, intelligence operatives, and investment bankers on American corporate media. The truth is that the powers that be want Americans to know just how brutal the Israeli soldiers are. We are forced to reach to the conclusion that the establishment wants to make Gaza the center of attention on purpose. As J. P. Morgan noted, “Everything in politics has two reasons: a good reason and a real reason.” That reality is ignored by the critics of genocide.
The Three Taboos for the Protestors and the “Truth Tellers”
For all the good intentions of the students, and of the “independent’ journalists covering the Gaza slaughter as part of this anti-genocide movement, the whole effort is painted in the phosphorescent paint of historical nostalgia—which is smeared all over the supposed “alternative” candidates Jill Stein, and Cornel West as well (Robert Kennedy is in the blood of the Gaza up to his elbows).
The analogy to the anti-Vietnam War protests we are force-fed is intentionally misleading. We are facing the spread of totalitarian governance around the world just has happened under the name of “fascism” in the 1930s. That global transformation of the political economy is fundamentally different than the limited anti-imperialist movement found in the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the powerful want us to be historically confused.
Three events that made the current Gaza massacre possible are left out of the discussion among the protesters. As uncomfortable as the truth may be, failure to address the real origins of this campaign in Gaza means that activists cannot comprehend the manner in which the institutional decay of Israel’s government has resulted its complete absorption into a global war against humanity that headed by the billionaires, a war that is not limited to nation states or to ethnic groups. To focus on racial animosity in Palestine is to miss the whole point.
First there is only silence on campus concerning the central role of Israeli intelligence (along with American, British and Saudi intelligence) in the execution of, and the cover up of, the 9.11 incident, a massive false flag attack designed to drag the United States into numerous foreign wars and to establish a system of secret governance in Washington that is still in place and that makes this level of US government support for Israel’s military killings possible.
If the protesters cannot mention a single word about this central event in American history, one that resulted in a horrific fusing together of unaccountable intelligence factions in Washington and Tel Aviv which are leading the current drive for global totalitarianism, then perhaps the protests are not quite as brave, or as truthful, as they claim to be.
Another taboo topic for the protesters is the role of global pharmaceutical and IT firms, all deeply connected to Israel’s military-intelligence-technology complex, in planning and carrying out the COVID-19 operation along with partners in Mossad, in the US intelligence community, at DARPA, in private equity and investment banks, and other secret partners in Australia, Germany, Australia, China, and South Korea. Israeli companies and government institutions played key roles in brokering these contracts, and pushing through classified contracts between nation states and companies like Pfizer that made the COVID reign of terror possible.
That is right, the most dangerous actions undertaken by Mossad and the IDF in the history of Israel, which have left millions dead and tens of millions crippled by vaccines, are not even mentioned by the protesters. Some of the Harvard protesters even posed wearing COVID-era facemasks for the photos in front of Widner Library that appeared in the New York Times.
Finally, the deafening silence about the true nature of the October seventh “Hamas attack” among the protesters sadly revealed that the protesters are merely regurgitating establishment propaganda about the key event. (1)
Protesters accept the bankrupt argument that the problem is Israel’s “disproportionate response” to the October 7th killings of Israelis by Hamas. But evidence is piled up to the sky that the entire attack was a false flag orchestrated by factions of Israeli intelligence, with their partners in the military, industry, civil society, and yes, even some parts of Hamas, so as to justify the Gaza campaign. (2)
Moreover, the false flag attack on Israeli citizens was carried out in an intentionally sloppy and heavy-handed manner so as to permanently corrupt the political discourse in Israel and the United States by forcing citizens to embrace assumptions that they know full well were false. When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stated on June that after the bogus peace talks with a puppet regime Hamas that responsibility for further fighting was “on them” he opened up the door to an Alice in Wonderland post-truth diplomacy. If those seeking peace must accept the bogus tale of hostage exchanges made up by the backroom boys before they can be a part of any political debate, then the whole purpose of these discussions with “Hamas” is to degrade, to reduce to junk, all discourse.
The brutal killing of Palestinians is not simply the result of racist soldiers following orders from cruel generals, but rather the natural consequence of an Israeli government that follows orders from the agents of private equity that have taken control of the governments of Israel, the United States, and Great Britain (and other nations) and who wish to destroy civil society and to force citizens to accept a brutal new form of politics—starting with Israel and Palestine. Framing the problem as simply a result of a racist Israel creates an intellectual dead end that is designed to trap the well-meaning, but cowardly, in a hall of mirrors that paralyzes and ends political action.
Is not the myopic focus on Gaza is the geopolitical equivalent of a “get your hand out my pocket” moment that is perfectly timed to distract us during the seizure of control of the United States, and other nations of the world, by a handful of private equity firms using IT giants to assume all regular functions of government while preparing another international security crisis that will allow them to spring the trap?
Israel is quite helpful for the super-rich, always willing to play the bad cop and offer up private intelligence firms and mercenary teams that are happy to do just about anyone’s dirty work. Israel also a great prize because it offers up negative headlines that draw attention away from greater evils. That is right, one of Israel’s propaganda roles is making the criminal and unaccountable US military appear good by comparison.
The Treason of the Intellectuals
You might think that in a crisis of this scale that American intellectuals would be rising to the occasion, denouncing these deep crimes. You would be wrong.
Most everyone who is presented as anti-establishment and anti-war has signed a secret contract with the devil.
They embrace a reductionist narrative of the Gaza attacks focused on how Israel as a nation state is being unfair to Palestinians.
The real agenda is swept under the carpet by these accomplished scholars.
The real agenda is the stealthy militarization of the economy, the controlled demolition of the courts, the destruction of money, the takeover of agriculture and water by multinational corporations, the establishment of an armed monopoly of distribution and logistics, the secret control of hospitals and universities through classified directives from the NSA, and other preparations for the complete control of all economic and political activity.
That is precisely what Cornell West and Chris Hedges are not talking about.
Erudite public intellectuals like John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago, Jeffery Sachs at Columbia University, General Douglas McGregor, or Scott Ridder, push a Gaza-centric narrative that is not technically wrong. The account they give of what Israel is doing on the ground in Gaza, and its geopolitical implications is accurate, but woefully incomplete. These experts are silent as the tomb about Israel’s role in facilitating the takeover of all the major governments of the world by Oracle, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, or how Israeli private intelligence works with those companies to take down whole nations, to allow for the converts control food and medicine, education and journalism, water and energy, by a handful of trusts that cannot be named. This is a global project for which Israel serves as the battering ram.
Tellingly, there is not a word in the debate on Israel at Ivy League campuses that is based on the fine analysis of Jeff Halper, a scholar active in Israel and the United States who demonstrates in his article “We are all being Palestinized” (3) how Israel serves as a clearing house for new weapons, and social control systems, that are being marketed around the world to just about any government or corporation that will pay.
Students protesters do not quote Antony Loewenstein’s book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (4) which limns the commercialization of the Israeli pacification techniques, from surveillance to lawfare, by corporations and nations of all shapes and sizes, as part of a global takeover which ultimately has little to do with Palestinians.
Nor do those standing in solidarity with the Palestinians showing much interest in Said Saddiki’s book World of Walls: The Structure, Roles and Effectiveness of Separation Barriers (5) that dissects the profitable business of creating strategic separations in communities based on the techniques developed in the occupied territories using walls, biometric IDs and surveillance, and how those same firms are also successfully bidding for Homeland Security contracts to build high-tech barriers US-Mexican border, as well as bidding for the security and surveillance contracts at your local shopping mall or power plant.
Wall surrounding Gaza
Wall on US-Mexican border built by Israeli firm
The Israeli military intelligence complex has perfected the techniques developed by the US in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam for brutal social control (which was based on techniques taken from British East India Corporation). They are perfecting the techniques in Gaza, but their work on the 9/11 incident and the COVID-19 operation were also critical to the project. To leave those two operations out of the equation is to paint a one-dimensional Israel that makes no sense.
Remember the excitement about a great victory over the globalists whipped up in the days before the WHO meetings to approve amendments to the infamous pandemic treaty at the beginning of this month. The alternative media was filled then with reports that the WHO’s bid to seize control of our bodies of all of humanity had been thwarted by protests. Peter Koenig’s article in Global Research declared on June 3, “WHO’s Pandemic Treaty Is Dead – For Now.” (6) But it was all a big fake out, one launched at precisely the moment that national leaders had been cowed into silence by the near successful assassination of Robert Fico of Slovakia and by threats behind the scenes against other public figures.
Now that same alternative media, is telling us that Israel is on the ropes and the anti-globalists are winning in Europe. But those new leaders of the so-called “conservatives” have not promised to take any meaningful steps against the reign of terror by multinational corporations—they have only made vague anti-vaccine declarations and will double down on enforcement of secrecy, give the government extraordinary martial powers, privatize police functions, and gear up for world war.
Israel as the engine driving the bio-nano-IT juggernaut against humanity is not on the ropes; the business for using bio-surveillance and the next-generation of vaccines employing advanced nano-technology to mow down the citizens of the earth is booming.
The critiques of these public intellectuals are focused on Netanyahu and Biden, but they never admit that these two sad old men are but the patsies in the plans of the big boys. They purposely kept both in power past their expiration dates, rendering them as lame politicians, hated by their own citizens, who can be removed from power at any time.
The Netanyahu and Biden administrations are designed to allow immunity from all accountability for the consulting firms actually directing the puppet show.
We must face the bitter truth that the partial truth tellers, limited hangout self-promoters, like Tucker Carson, Scott Ritter, and Larry Johnson generously provide us with a false narrative that is sweetened by a thin topping of anti-establishment rhetoric. They are intentionally covering up the most serious threat of all: the unlimited class warfare of the billionaires against all of humanity.
A Final Solution with a Human Face?
The super-rich have pulled out all the stops, and called in all their puppets, whether progressive or conservative, black or white, Christian or Muslim. We are being prepped to accept that a group of fascistic politicians in Europe and the United States groomed by the bankers were somehow our choice.
The struggles between nation states and ethnic groups are real; the massacres in Gaza are no show. Moreover, the crackdowns on student protests at Harvard and Columbia are an attack on due process meant as blatant intimidation for all citizens. At the same time, all these events are but one part of a larger struggle that has been purposely highlighted at the expense of even more dangerous transformations.
There are two kinds of wars taking place today in precisely the same way that there were two kinds wars waged during the 1940s.
Today we are treated to an unending narrative about Israel’s crimes in Gaza that leaves no space for a deeper consideration of how Israel functions in the global economy, or how it plays the central role in assisting IT corporations, private intelligence firms, and mercenaries to plan and enforce the great lockdown of humanity from Shanghai to Istanbul, from London to Melbourne, from Seoul to Chicago.
Similarly, newspaper headlines screamed out about Germany’s military incursions on the Eastern front against Russia, and on the Southern and Western fronts against Great Britain and the United States, during the Second World War, grabbing the public’s attention. But at that very moment, the governments of America and Britain were mum about the final solution, the quiet war against unarmed citizens undertaken by Germany’s operatives in central and eastern Europe.
In spite of public demonstrations at home, and the presentation to the British and American governments of carefully documented materials by refugees that proved without a doubt that the campaign was real, Roosevelt and Churchill remained silent (7) about the plans to secretly kill off tens of millions of people in Eastern and Central Europe, starting with Jews, Gypsies, and other ethnic minorities, and extending to Russian prisoners of war. Move over, those killings were just the start of a larger plan for depopulation that would be implemented as soon as Russia had been conquered.
Just as Amazon and Google stand to make untold fortunes for the rich from the current final solution against humanity using vaccines, nano-weapons, and the internet of distraction and confusion which is designed to dumb down and pacify the population, so also IBM and Ford Motor Company had their fingers deep the Nazi project of invisible warfare against the people, and would have been part of the profitable plan to liquify tens of millions more in Russia, and elsewhere, if Germany had been successful.
If Google obtained Homeland Security contracts for contact tracing so as to enforce COVID-19 vaccines, so also did IBM obtain contracts with the SS to use its punch card computers to keep track of the secret German cattle cars that dashed between European capitals and death camps. (8) Just as Apple uses the slave labor made available by the COVID-19 biomedical regime to assemble Apple Watches cheaply in Thailand, so also Ford Motors used the slave labor of the death camps for its assembly lines. (9)
The hidden war in Europe from the formation of a chain of command for the Einsatzgruppen in 1939 to the Wannsee Conference of 1942 that systematized the existing plans for mass killings of unwanted people, was plenty real, even if invisible. A similar biomedical system for global genocide coordinated by factions at Mossad and DARPA, and their allies in IT and the pharmaceutical industry, is being constructed behind walls of secrecy as we speak today.
The blank-face horror of the moral and ideological collapse of the 1940s was best articulated by the slogan placed at the entrance to the deathcamp Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei” (work will set you free), that welcomed those getting off the trains in expectation of employment into a slaughterhouse.
In the current war on humanity, the innocuous equivalent for the youth who are being led to the slaughter by mind-numbing video games, pornography and Instagram behavior modification projects, and next-generation vaccines, is Apple’s “Think different.”
When George Orwell wrote that “history stopped in 1936,” he was referring to the devastatingly complete victory of “politics over truth,” as Hannah Arendt put it, in Europe. The complete breakdown of a journalistic and intellectual discourse rooted in reality that Orwell witnessed then was not different from the web of lies produced by the COVID regime that has caught intellectuals like flies in a spider’s web.
For Orwell, that death of truth and history made possible the fascist attack on Guernica on April 26, 1937. And that, in turn, made the invasion of Russia and the final solution acceptable, or at least bearable, for the general population. Deep psychological trauma opened the gates to hell.
Similarly, the genocide in Gaza is not simply an emotional attack on the Palestinians by irrational racist Jews, but is a strategic show of contempt for moral norms and international law identical to the attack on Guernica by the Fascists in 1937. Guernica allowed for the testing of new incendiary explosives, and dive bombers, that would later be put to use in the invasion of Poland and the campaign towards Moscow. The attack on Gaza serves a similar purpose.
As fantastic as the concept of killing off entire populations for profit may sound to us, this business model is nothing new. It was carried out against the native peoples of North and South America from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, including the use of biological weapons and information warfare to confuse and divide the resistance. It was carried out in the Congo by Belgium financial interests, and in Turkey and in Eastern Europe, and it has been tried elsewhere.
The plan for “Greater Israel” is not merely an extension of political and territorial control from Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem, to the entirety of Palestine, and beyond to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Greater Israel extends beyond the region to include the control of electric grids in Shanghai and New Orleans, the management of safety systems for power plants throughout the Middle East, the security software (and perhaps even the launch codes) for the US Strategic Command, and the databases of the Sandia National Laboratories by agile Israeli-based IT firms that constantly change their camouflage.
Brutal at the Gaza cleansing may be, there is nothing emotional or ideological about it. It is but a cold calculation made by the predatory financial-technological system that controls Israel’s government completely, but that also has its fingers in the endowments of Harvard and Columbia, and that is designing health care centers, charter schools, AI-based safety protocols, innovative prisons and corrective facilities, and military bases and immigrant detention facilities across the country in preparation for something unspeakable, something coming very soon, something still hidden behind classified directives and nondisclosure agreements as it slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) Red Pill Expo “Gaza: The Astounding Parallels with 9.11” Richard Gage 9/11
(7) “Witness to the Persecution: The Allies and the Holocaust: A Review Essay” Deborah E. Lipstadt, Modern Judaism (Oxford University Press) Vol. 3, No. 3 (Oct., 1983), pp. 319-338
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This analysis does not pretend to lay out “absolute truth.” Rather it’s my best effort at synthesizing in a concise format the key elements involved in my understanding of world events.
1. The U.S. is a multiethnic nation formed from a confluence of indigenous Native American settlement, settlement and conquest by Europeans, a large influx of enslaved Africans, and later immigration from European, Asian, and African peoples of diverse nationalities up through today.
2. The core of the U.S. were colonies of England along the Atlantic coast, with North, Central, and South America also the location of colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands.
3. Colonies were established elsewhere in the world all the way through to the 20thcentury, with Germany and Italy also becoming colonialist powers, while Russia expanded in Eurasia and Japan in East Asia. Ancient indigenous civilizations worldwide were exploited or destroyed by the colonizing powers. The prime motive was the acquisition of wealth and resources.
4. European expansion required a monetary system to enable its growth. During the Middle Ages, the Knights Templar ran the European monetary system but without Usury—i.e., charging of interest on loans. The Catholic Church ceased its prohibition on the MORTAL SIN of Usury around 1500. Fractional reserve banking was built on gold and silver from America and India/China with Usury-based banking assuring the accumulation of wealth by the owners of merchant banks. Jewish bankers were key players in this system.
5. The system continues today, creating constant pressure for
1) massive public and private debt, constantly rolled over with new debt;
2) centralization of wealth;
3) an imperative for unceasing economic growth;
4) consolidation, monopoly, and gigantism;
5) increased velocity of spending;
6) inflation;
7) constant threat of bankruptcy and ruination;
8) financialization of all human activity with associated non-producing overhead;
9) constant imperative to cut costs resulting in environmental pollution, infrastructure collapse, and workforce oppression;
10) constant subjection to economic and organized crime today centering on drug trafficking;
11) political crime and unending propaganda and cover-ups; and 11) unceasing competition and warfare among nation-states orchestrated by the money-masters.
6. All this was foreseen in the biblical parable of Jesus driving the money changers from the temple. It’s why they crucified him.
7. Returning to America, for almost 200 years the English colonies grew, functioned, and prospered with indigenous forms of money, including Indian wampum, without a single bank. The passage by Parliament of the Currency Act of 1764, prohibiting issuance of paper money by the colonies, ended this era of financial sustainability and was the main cause of the American Declaration of Independence.
8. The first U.S. bank, the Bank of North America, was chartered in 1781 in Philadelphia. This led to the First Bank of the United States that was used mainly to finance speculation by rich investors, most of them Dutch and British allied with the growing American merchant class, many of whom got rich in the slave and opium trades.
9. Fractional reserve banking grew throughout the U.S., with economic growth fueled in part by sale of land confiscated from the Indians. The federal government was funded by customs duties from trade with most of its budget consumed by the army and navy. The War of 1812 completed the Revolution against England.
10. The Southern slave states, in league with New York/British bankers and merchants, broke away from the Union in 1861. Lincoln fought the Civil War with cash directly issued from the Treasury known as Greenbacks. Lincoln was killed by a British-financed conspiracy, as were Presidents Garfield and McKinley.
11. The Industrial Revolution took place after the Civil War with capital from U.S. and British banks, led by the Morgans and British Rothschilds. By 1900, the Money Trust controlled U.S. industry and adopted the gold standard. With the Rothschilds and their banking allies, they created the Federal Reserve in 1913 to finance Britain’s war to annihilate Germany.
12. British gold and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes had directed his executor, Lord Nathan Rothschild, to create a “secret society” to “recover America for the British Empire,” which was done through a century of world wars, with Britain providing the brains and America the muscle. The Zionist Jews were enlisted to help out by giving them Palestine. The idea of a Jewish-controlled Palestine had originated with the British government and was adopted by the Zionist Movement.
13. The immediate goal of the British Empire as it organized itself through the Rhodes/Rothschild/Milner “Round Table’ after 1900 was to control the Eurasian “Heartland” along the Mackinder Line running from the Baltic Sea through Eastern Europe, bisecting Ukraine, and terminating in Palestine. Conquest of this region, involving the destruction of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually Russia, has been the focal point for WWI, WWII, and what is rapidly becoming WWIII.
14. In 1940-1941, the US Council on Foreign Relations, a Rockefeller-controlled entity modeled on Britain’s Chatham House, submitted a series of studies to the U.S. government that established a permanent policy of TOTAL U.S. military dominance over the entire world. This policy became the post-World War II national security state, setting up the CIA, NSA, etc., then later the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1991 and today’s policy of “Full-Spectrum Dominance,” including cyberspace, outer space, etc. The Council on Foreign Relations was also a central actor in the JFK assassination and cover-up.
15. World War II never ended. The policy of world military dominance has never been rescinded or modified. Note, however, that the U.S. military operates under the direction of the global financial elite. While U.S. military power is backed by dollar hegemony, the geopolitical power center resides in London.
16. The entire mainstream media of the Collective West has been commandeered and controlled to propagandize for the Empire. The internet has produced a slight hiccup to this program, but citizen usage is under relentless attack, while at the same time being a tool for massive Deep State surveillance, “lawfare,” and population control
17. The Zionists formed themselves into the Neocon faction that has run U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the London and New York-based financiers since the Reagan administration. One of their major projects was 9/11.
18. The latest episode is the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire’s war against Russia in Ukraine, with Russia having been declared the enemy in the late 1940s after Germany was destroyed. The degree to which the government of Russia is complicit today in the overall globalist plan is unclear. The Zionists, meanwhile, are engaged in genocidal wars trying to create Greater Israel for their own purposes.
19. Today the Empire is apparently being countered by Russia, Iran, China, and the Global South via BRICS+. This transition to multipolarity may itself be a project of global finance.
20. Here and there are growing numbers of individuals who see what is going on and looking for a way out. The nations of the world, always subservient to global finance, are trying to stop this awakening by committing genocide against their own populations, through massive drug proliferation, malnutrition, and iatrogenic disease, and now through Covid and other coming “plandemics,” along with the “climate change” hoax.
21. A globalist conspiracy for population reduction works in the background. The elite in their frustration would rather destroy the world than give up their addictions, vanity, and privileges, even though modern industry and technology could make a decent living possible for the entire world population.
22. A central part of the scenario is control of nuclear weapons. A nuclear World War III remains a possibility. Running the show for the U.S. is Joe Biden’s handlers. His opponent, Donald Trump, shows no signs of being knowledgeable enough to turn the situation around and may be headed for prison. Robert Kennedy ignores the larger economic issues with a campaign that well may be a “limited hangout.” Whether there will even be a US in another decade is anyone’s guess.
23. The “sin” that makes everything else possible is the Usury which enables a demiurgic force destructive of humanity.
24. Renewal of human hopes is only possible starting with the level of individual human beings awakening to their spiritual potential. We must see what is going on, forcefully denounce abuses, and seek the Spirit within through the guidance available. All authentic traditional religions point to the potential for opening the doors within ourselves to this guidance.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also see the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Three Sages.
Richard C. Cook is a co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute. Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle, documenting the event in his book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his analysis in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an advisor to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book giving a revisionist view of U.S. history: Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023.
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In a third video in a series investigating the U.S. State Department, officials provide an inside look at the Biden Administration’s disastrous handling of the mass illegal immigration crisis, and even provide a theory for why the Southern Border has been left wide open – to change the population demographics of the United States.
Daniel Fitzgerald, a State Department Official responsible for allocating U.S. foreign aid across the Western Hemisphere told a Veritas investigative journalist that the U.S. State Department will be forced to answer to Congress for its failure to slow migration from Central America.
He describes failed efforts to pour ‘four billion over four years’ into Central America as part of the Biden Administration’s “Root Causes Strategy.” Under this plan, Washington provides foreign assistance to Latin American countries in order to preemptively relieve hardships that would trigger migrants to abandon their countries for the U.S. However, Fitzgerald shares that the plan isn’t working because migrants are now coming from new countries they didn’t account for.
“Migrants are coming from elsewhere, like Venezuela. So, we’re like, this [the Root Causes Strategy] doesn’t solve that problem.”
Fitzgerald admits that while he didn’t originally see illegal immigration as a concern, his mind has changed and those who raise issue with unchecked immigration are ‘on to something.’
“In my mind, I’m like oh, it’s not that much [illegal immigration]. And then I see the chart, I’m like oh that’s a lot compared to twenty years ago.”
As the U.S. experiences an unparalleled influx of illegal border crossings, Fitzgerald admits he and his colleagues are puzzled and without solutions. “There’s no clear answer,” he says. This appears to be a concerning admission of either incompetence or unwillingness of the Biden Administration’s ability to get a handle on the Southern Border.
Fitzgerald admits these negative immigration optics are a problem that could threaten Biden’s reelection odds.
“It looks bad for any administration because no one solves migration… it’s like the end all, be all, kill pill for politics.”
In another division within the U.S. State Department, an International Consular also criticized this administration’s handling of mass migration and expressed a desire to tell the world what he’s witnessed in his role.
“I wish people knew we were letting in criminals [to the United States] daily.”
The official went on to explain that Mexico is sending “the worst of the worst” into the U.S. He described a scenario where illegal immigrants send billions in U.S. wages back to Mexico, stating Mexico enjoys the influx of cash and has no incentive to intervene.
Why is all this happening? The end goal of unchecked migration, the official says, is demographics change in the U.S.
“Traditional, standard Americans are not leftists. Latin Americans are all leftists. This is just to try and change the demographics [of the United States].
The intentional goal of elites to replace ethnic European populations with demographically and culturally different groups through mass migration is a theory known as “the Great Replacement,” popularized by French novelist and political activist, Renaud Camus.
This theory of demographic substitution is often criticized by legacy media as racist and xenophobic and results in violence. Those who suggest that it may be true and notice it happening, or who note that Democrats may be using illegal immigration to secure votes, are routinely deplatformed and demonized.
This has happened to people as prominent and as diverse as billionaire Elon Musk, Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, or journalist Tucker Carlson – who are routinely flogged by media and labeled as ‘conspiracy theorists’ for noticing that this theory might be true.
Critics of the Great Replacement idea omit that the demographics of the United States have indeed changed – at numerical levels greater than at any time in American history.
In fact, since President Biden’s election, growth in the foreign-born population of the United States has been unprecedented, increasing by 6.6 million in just 39 months.
A May 2024 Report produced by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) explains,
“The foreign-born population increased 5.1 million from March 2022 to March 2024…the numerical increase in the last two years is larger than in any two-year period in American history… 51.6 million and 15.6 percent of the population, the foreign-born population is higher now than at any time in American history. The number of immigrants has increased five-fold since 1970, 2.6-fold since 1990, and by more than two-thirds since 2000.”
While Project Veritas in unable to verify if demographic replacement is indeed the goal of the Biden Administration, it’s clear that this is certainly the reality and result of the administration’s policies, and migrants from Latin America are a large contributing factor to this shift.
CIS explains,
“The recent increase in the foreign-born population from Latin America is an indication of the large role illegal immigration has played in the dramatic increase in the overall size of the foreign-born population since January 2021.”
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The Western powers heavily intervened in Russia against the Bolsheviks (1918-21), only to face humiliation and see their own troops revolt.
US Troops in Vladivostovk, 1918
Hitler’s Germany attacked Russia and was destroyed.
Their glory is apparently envied now by Biden, Scholz, Macron, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen etc., perhaps the most decadent coterie of “leaders” of the West in its whole history.
Of very low intellectual quality, those persons probably they have just a very vague idea, if they have, of European history, which makes easier for them to repeat it.
The only problem is that we now possess nuclear weapons and a whole host of other technological means that did not exist before 1945.
This is why the new campaign risks becoming not just the Waterloo of the West, but the Waterloo of humanity, unless humanity is mobilized in a massive and dynamic way to prevent its destruction.
We explained in a previous article why the latest decisions of the United States and NATO dramatically increase the possibility of a global nuclear war since, as we explained, they overturn the most basic principles of “nuclear stability” established in the past by the US and the USSR. Even if we don’t go immediately to global nuclear war Russia and the NATO are two technologically very advanced countries. They can transform into hell the planet even before they go nuclear.
This is more than just a personal viewpoint. The President of the United States himself, Joe Biden, said repeatedly the same.
From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, he has refused to provide Ukraine with long-range weapons capable of striking deep into Russian territory, arguing that we want to help Ukraine, but not to provoke ‘World War III’.
The argument that we should not provoke World War III was ever-present in White House deliberations on Ukraine policy (see this) until the President surrendered to the “War Party” within the collective West and the US government. So either Biden doesn’t know what he says and what he does, which is very dangerous when the decisions concern the very survival of humanity, or he knows what he says and, for reasons he himself knows, he chooses to take the risk of World War III, that is, the destruction of humanity.
I understand that my writing may be hard for the reader to take at face value. Having followed somewhat systematically for many years the issues of nuclear arms control and East-West relations, I have highlighted in my articles the path that has gradually led us to where we are, and warned about the risks of establishing new US bases in my own country, where even the explosion of a ‘small’ tactical nuclear device can lead to a radiation disaster. One of the main US bases is in Alexandroupolis, in Northeastern Greece, and most of the time in Greece the winds are Northeastern. Thus, the radiation from Alexandroupolis can fast go to the Attica agglomeration, where half of the Greek population are living. No one responded to me with arguments, but I was met with a great deal of skepticism and criticism, for my supposed doomsday mentality. Confirmation does not bring me any joy and I am still praying that I won’t be confirmed any more.
The thing seems completely logical and completely absurd at the same time. The biggest barrier to understanding reality is the constraints of our imagination, as the great French geneticist Albert Jacquard once wrote. Most people have a mechanism for denying reality if we feel it exceeds us, the same as ostriches have. Unable to bear the stress of danger, or not knowing how to deal with it, we prefer not to see it. But the nightmare is here, it is in the external reality. And the only way to avoid it is to mobilise states and societies.
Rapid Escalation
In the three days since I wrote my previous article on the risk of nuclear war, a series of news reports have confirmed our conclusion that we are heading towards the most serious nuclear crisis in our history.
After Biden’s decision to allow the use of US weapons against targets on Russian territory, within three days, the French are preparing to send troops to Ukraine, the Germans are discussing the possibility of recruiting 900,000 reservists, the Dutch and the Danes say they have no problem if the F16s they give to Ukraine strike inside Russia. But these aircraft can carry nuclear weapons. In other words, the Russians will be under constant threat and uncertainty that they could be subject to a nuclear attack.
Increasing uncertainty can cause nuclear war by mistake, while facilitating a provocation. The existence of such weapons in Ukraine, where Zelensky now seems to be fully controlled not only by the West in general, but by the extremist “Party of War” within it, makes any provocation much easier, i.e. destabilizes the most crucial factor of nuclear stability.
It’s like a poker game where the opponents are constantly moving up in stakes. US weapons have already carried out deadly attacks in Belgorod, Russia. Russia, as Putin himself said, responded by carrying out an attack in the direction of Kharkiv.
So what do they think in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin? That they will keep escalating the intervention in Ukraine and Moscow will not respond? Or do they want it to respond, they want escalation, taking things to a nuclear conflict without taking themselves the responsibility of it?
The Russians, for their part, released a map of the bases where the United States has stored nuclear weapons in Europe and Putin made a special reference to small European states whose leaders do not understand what they are getting themselves into. Most European media did not even report this news.
What do you think? Where exactly is this whole thing going?
European States: Fatal and Spineless Puppets
The vast majority of European political personnel, directly dependent on NATO and the US services, as it seems, and of a low moral and intellectual level, are powerless to challenge decisions and plans that threaten to lead Europe and humanity to their end.
An honourable exception is the Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán (see this), whom many may not like for other issues, but who had the courage to clearly oppose the war plans and is now threatened from Brussels, the seat of a supposedly democratic and increasingly totalitarian, European Union, with the exclusion of Hungarians from all posts in the EU. There is also, of course, the left-wing Slovak Prime Minister Fico, even more radical in his criticism of NATO policy, but someone made sure he was sent to hospital.
Orban said that he has never witnessed such irresponsibility in his life as he has seen in Europe’s involvement in Ukraine, without even an assessment of the costs and means needed to achieve its objective goals. NATO is becoming a directly involved party in Ukraine and the chances of avoiding this are limited. He said that he is not prepared, however, to allow Brussels and Berlin to decide that they should send Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine and lead his country back into war against Russia, as Hitler did.
Another European statesman, the President of Bulgaria has warned that NATO’s policy is bringing us to Nuclear Armageddon.
The “European Army”
Last month, the leader of the European People’s Party (EPP), Weber said that he wants the introduction of compulsory service and the creation of a European Army, which would not be subject to the constraints of control by national governments. In other words, Brussels will directly send European soldiers to Ukraine without asking anyone.
At the same time, the idea of a “military Schengen” is being discussed, i.e. NATO troops being able to move into EU territory without consulting governments.
European leaders do not understand that what they are doing is probably a prelude to the third world war and they think of nuclear bombs as a “tactical deterrent tool”, not as something that will actually be used, but what may not seem likely at the start of a war could occur by its conclusion, as the Hungarian Prime Minister pointed out.
The Central Question
The Americans may hope that, even if a nuclear conflict occurs, it will be under control and confined to European territory. But such calculations are utterly foolish. If humanity crosses the threshold of using nuclear weapons, whether tactical or strategic, it will be extremely difficult to control and contain, even to keep it on European soil. Most likely, once mankind crosses the nuclear threshold, it will be the end of mankind.
Ultimately, the question that political forces and societies in the West have to answer is this: Do we want to risk the very existence of humanity, clearly not for the sake of Ukraine or democracy, but to uphold the dominance of an ultra tiny minority over the planet and our own nations?
Is it not time to start thinking again like Roosevelt, the two Kennedys, De Gaulle, Willy Brandt, Olaf Palme, Aldo Moro, Andreas Papandreou? Where they all working for Moscow as agents? Is it not time for the people to mobilise?
Because, as Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy said, those who survive a nuclear war, the living, will envy those who have died.
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Luca Placidi: Welcome, everybody. It is a great pleasure and honor to have with us today Professor Michael Hudson. For those who still do not know him, Michael is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he is a researcher at the Levi Economics Institute at Bard College.
Just to mention a few works published with the help of technology, we want to recall Superimperialism, the Economic Strategy of the American Empire.
Its third edition came out in 2021. Then we have “… And Forgive Them Their Debts,” published in 2018.
The latest is The Collapse of Antiquity, published in 2023.
Michael is also a former Wall Street analyst, a political consultant, and is hosting the Geopolitical Economy Hour together with Radhika Desai, which is broadcast at Ben Norton’s YouTube channel, Geopolitical Economy Report.
Professor, welcome, and thanks again for being with us today.
Video: Prof. Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be able to speak to an Italian audience.
Luca Placidi: That is very good. Thank you. To kick off our conversation, would you agree that the Ukrainian war and even more the latest NATO summit with its final declaration are showing us that we are now back in a multipolar war, in which the global South it is opposed to the Western world?
Michael Hudson: Well, it’s more than just a geographic split. We’re really in a civilizational split, and it goes much deeper. What’s at stake is what kind of economy is the world going to have?
Is it going to be a financialized, neoliberal post-industrial economy, which is what the United States and Europe are pushing? Or is it going to be the kind of economy that textbooks talk about, where economies produce agricultural and industrial goods to feed themselves and make everybody prosper? I almost would use Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, Barbarism or Socialism, because the West no longer has the means of real economic control over trade and production. It only has military force, terrorist violence and corruption to maintain its control.
The NATO West does financial control by having loaded down the global South and even many Asian countries with dollarized debt for the last 70 years. That dollarized debt holds them in a financial neocolonialism, an international debt peonage. Besides that, the ultimate power that the United States and Europe have to maintain their unipolar control to prevent other countries from going their own way and pursuing their own interests is to bomb them and mobilize terrorism.
The NATO West has lost its basic industrial or agricultural control because it has outsourced its industry to China and other Asian economies, and its sanctions against Russia and other countries have obliged them to become self-sufficient instead of relying on the West for a widening range of their basic needs. So these countries are now in a position to use their labor, industry and agriculture to make themselves prosperous and regain control over their economies, not to make U.S. and European investors rich. They want to take control of their economies in a way that will raise their wages and living standards.
That can’t be done if they follow a policy of privatization, World Bank advice and the IMF’s instructions to sell off their land and raw materials, privatize and sell off their public infrastructure, communications, electrical systems and water rights to foreigners while getting rid of government regulation and social-support programs. The West’s demand is to let the private sector run everything without government “interference.” Well, there’s no way that any economy can grow and get prosperous without being a mixed economy with strong public infrastructure providing basic needs at non-monopoly prices.
There are many natural area for governments to operate more efficiently than the private sector. They can provide basic services that otherwise would be monopolized to charge extortionate prices to extract predatory monopoly rents for their owners. If a government doesn’t provide education, the result will be what’s happening in America, where the average cost of a college education is $40,000 or $50,000 a year. If you don’t have public health, you’re going to have a very expensive privatized health care that’s not available to everybody. In the United States that absorbs 18% of GDP, more than any other country. That kind of monopoly overhead doesn’t leave much room for the overall economy to be competitive with mixed public/private economies.
Most important, if you let money and credit be privatized by banks instead of doing what China has done and keep money as a public utility, then you let banks decide where the economy’s credit will be allocated. That makes them the economy’s central planners. Their preference is to supply credit not to finance industrial investment and growth, but to finance debt-leveraging to inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds, and for raiders to take over companies and empty them out, leaving debt-ridden shells in their place. like Thames Water in Britain, Sears Roebuck in the United States. That is what has been happening since the 1980s under Thatcherism and Reaganomics.
So the split between the West and the rest of the world, the global majority, is really about what kind of an economy most of the world will have. That’s why the United States is fighting so viciously to maintain its unipolar control. It’s fighting against the global majority today in the same way that it fought against the Soviet Union after 1917. It doesn’t want a rival kind of economic system to develop. So what we’re seeing is a split with the global majority that is trying to decide how to design an economy that’s going to help their member countries grow? That is the global fracture that is occurring, and it’s a civilizational break.
How are Global South countries to grow if they remain obliged to pay all of the dollarized foreign debts that they’ve been loaded down. These debts are the legacy of being obliged to follow destructive International Monetary Fund advice to impose austerity and to privatize and sell off their assets in the public domain in order to obtain the dollars to pay their foreign creditors? The Western model is thus basically a form of financial colonialism. Its anti-government philosophy has devastated the Wes’s economies as well as those of debtor countries.
The rest of the world thus has an object lesson in what to avoid if it does not want to end up looking like the United States, post-Thatcher/Blair Britain or Germany since its anti-Russia sanctions of2022. I’ve discussed this in The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism (2022). Today’s civilizational break is not only against Russia and China. You can trace the break back to the Bandung Conference of non-aligned nations in 1955, seventy years ago.
In 1955, what was called the Third World or non-aligned nations recognized that they were being made poorer and poorer by the rules of the world economy that American diplomats and geopolitical strategists institutionalized with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the dollar standard. That international trade and monetary system was exploitative, first and foremost against America’s potential rivals in Britain and other European countries, and against the former colonial systems of these countries that the United States sought to appropriate and exploit for its own benefit.
The post-World War II order has been a new kind of imperialism. It basically is a financial imperialism, not the European-style colonial imperialism enforced by a military occupation. Financial control has proved less costly and hence more efficient for the neoliberal mode of international exploitation. Non-aligned victim countries couldn’t break away in 1954 or since because Cuba, Indonesia and the other non-aligned nations were not large enough to “go it alone.” If they tried to go it alone, they would have ended up looking like Venezuela has looked like in the last few years, or like Cuba looked like after its revolution. If the United Sates and Europe had imposed such sanctions, countries resisting this system would have been obliged to surrender to the West to avoid economic disruption. But sanctions were not even necessary at that time under “free market” imperialism U.S.-style.
The United States was in a position to treat countries resisting this exploitation it as outcasts. Its threat was to tell countries that acted to protect their economies, and especially their public enterprise, that the West would isolate them if they tried to go it alone. Their economies were indeed too small, even on a regional level, to survive on their own. They felt that they needed U.S. support and that of its IMF and World Bank.
What has changed is the remarkable growth of socialist China since the 1990s and post-neoliberal Russia since the late 1990s under President Putin. Today for the first time, Eurasian nations have enough economic self-sufficiency outside of the United States and Europe to be able to go it alone. They no longer need to depend on the NATO West, which is losing its ability to economically control them.
In fact, it’s the NATO West that has become dependent on China, Russia and the rest of Eurasia, along with the Global South if its people can resist their own client oligarchies to throw off their financial chains and adherence to the self-serving U.S. “rules-based order.”
What is so ironic is that U.S. diplomacy itself is spurring their break-away. One might have expected that China, the Global South and India, Latin America and Africa came to realize just how they’re being exploited, they would have taken the lead in breaking away. Yet it is the United States and NATO that have driven them to break away, by imposing trade and financial sanctions that have forced them to go it alone.
Ever since the war in Ukraine by the United States to break Germany and Europe away from their trade and investment relations with Russia and China began in 2022, the United States has mobilized its European and other English-speaking dependencies to impose economic sanctions that has devastated economies obeying these policies. The backlash resulting from German de-industrialization and America’s elbowing aside France as an arms supplier (e.g., for submarine sales to AUKUS and in trying to replace France in its former African possessions) is driving other countries away. America and Europe have isolated themselves from the Global Majority, replacing its prosperous trade and investment with Russia and China with economic dependency on the United States for oil and other higher-priced imports.
What’s so amazing is how self-destructive of its own global empire U.S. diplomacy has been. The focus of U.S. diplomacy on locking in its control over Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea by obliging them to join its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sanctions has obliged these designated U.S. enemies to replacing trade dependency on the West with their own mutual self-dependency.
They realize that they can never depend on the United Stats and European satellites for imports again. That should have been obvious to U.S. strategists. Once a country is blocked from importing its food, what’s it going to do? It’s going to grow its own food. When the United States imposed sanctions on Russia to block European exports of food to it, for instance, Russia was driven to produce its own butter, crops and other food instead of importing it from the Baltics and other former suppliers. And when U.S. officials demanded that its allies stop exporting computer chips to China, it moved quickly to develop its own domestic supply.
Other countries can’t depend on the United States or Europe for their food because they may be cut off again. So they’ll have to become self-sufficient. They can’t depend on the NATO West for industry or technology because it can try to disrupt their economy by interrupting their supply chains to force it to follow pro-NATO policies. As for Europe, it is left dependent on the United States now that it has let itself be isolated from Eurasia and the Global South.
The global fracture that is occurring in today’s world is not reversible. And it is all happening so quickly. Once a market is lost to countries able to free themselves and provide their own basic needs, that market is not recoverable. If the United States and NATO Europe stops exporting food and industrial products to sanctioned countries, they will make these products themselves. So when you sanction a country, it’s as if you’ve provided them with tariff protection to nurture their own production. That’s the “infant industry” argument that enabled the United States to rise to industrial power in the late 19th century. The logic was clearly spelled out by U.S. strategists. (I summarize this strategy in America’s Protective Takeoff: 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (2010). Needless to say, U.S. neoliberal rhetoric has sought to erase this history so as to “pull up the ladder” so that its logic will not be used by other countries to emulate the U.S. economic success – the same government sponsorship of industry that made Germany, France and other countries so successful since the 19th century.
Latin America and Africa are seeing that it is time to liberate their economic from “free-trade imperialism.” Instead of using their agricultural land to export plantation crops to the North, they’re going to use their land to begin feeding themselves with their own grain, their own rice and other food crops so that they no longer have to depend on American and European farm exports.
The U.S. policy of bullying countries by imposing trade sanctions has cut its own economic throat, so to speak. It’s almost humorous to see it dismantle the free-trade imperialism and dollar dependency that earlier generations of U.S. diplomacy tried so hard to impose on the rest of the world.
The meetings this year by the BRICS+ countries under Russian leadership this year and China next year are all about how to plan a trajectory for becoming independent from reliance on the West. That is what U.S. diplomacy itself has driven them to do.
Luca Placidi: As you were saying, Professor, it seems like the TINA Paradigm has been destroyed because now we have alternatives. It seems that the European political class is hopelessly submissive to the U.S. agenda. This is really disturbing, at least for us in Europe, because the war in Ukraine has destroyed the European economy.
Just think, as you’ve described, how the impact of the sanctions has penalized industrial production especially in Germany and Italy. Yet this has not been enough for Europe to reverse course and pull out of this conflict.
Michael Hudson: I think that you could call the war in Ukraine since 2022 an American war against Europe, because the great loser has been Germany, Italy, France and the rest of Europe. The United States has seen the writing on the wall and decided that if there’s going to be a fight between North America along with NATO against the rest of the world, it had better start by solidifying its control over Europe as a profitable market and debtor instead of its turning to Asia and being lost by the United States.
Image: Half a million tons of methane rise from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline. (Photo: Swedish Coast Guard)
Essentially, U.S. strategists are acknowledging that they know that America is not able to produce a real industrial surplus anymore. Its neoliberal trade policy has outsourced its industry to Asia. The only new market that it can secure if the Global Majority breaks away is that of Europe. That explains why the United States arranged for the Nord Stream pipeline to be blown up, and convinced Europe voluntarily to commit economic self-destruction by not buying low-priced Russian gas, oil and raw materials. While this has driven Russia and China together with their Asian neighbors, the losers have been European.
German industry has been moving out of the country to the United States and elsewhere for lower-cost energy. It’s been emigrating largely to the United States, making it the beneficiary. If you’re a German industrial company, what else are you going to do if its economy is shrinking?
If you look at labor productivity over the last hundred years, it goes parallel with energy use per worker. Energy is really the key. That’s why a centra; aim of American foreign policy since 1945 has been to control other countries in two ways, starting with oil. The United States, along with Britain and Holland, have controlled the world oil trade so that they can turn off the electricity, turn off the lights of countries that try to break away and act in their own self-interest.
Along with oil, the second tactic that America has used is to control grain and food. Let independent countries starve in the dark. But here once again, the sanctions have mainly been to make Europe suffer. Remember, America has fought against the European Economic Community ever since it was created in 1958. From the outset, America fought against the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). But for the EEC, the most important aim of integration was to protect its farmers and do for European agriculture what America had done for its agriculture.
Agricultural price supports enabled capital investment to raise farm productivity. Europe rationalized its agriculture and increased its capital investment to make it more productive. The result was that Europe has not only replaced its dependence on American food exports, but has become a major agricultural exporter. But now the expanded European Union is now suffering because of the sanctions not only against importing Russian gas to make fertilizer. And by supporting Ukraine, Europe is letting it dump its low-cost grain in Poland and other countries. Farmers already have staged riots to protest against their farm markets being undersold by the Ukrainians – with U.S. investors trying to buy up this land. That could roll back European agricultural independence and make it dependent once more on the United States or on countries that U.S. investors control.
The effect of this Cold War III so far has been to drive Europe back into the American orbit. The United States insists that there’s no alternative to this neoliberal geopolitics. Western textbooks indoctrinate students to believe that neoliberalism is the best way to run an economy efficiently – by not having a government to protect self-reliance and living standards, not to regulate against predatory monopoly and financial rent-seeking. The aim is to let capitalism evolve into monopoly capitalism, which is really finance capitalism, because monopolies are organized by the financial sector as “the mother of trusts.”
Although the United States has said there’s no alternative, there obviously is. But if countries don’t follow an alternative, they’re going to end up looking like Germany. In fact, what’s happened to Europe as a result of the war in Ukraine and U.S. sanctions is an object lesson for other countries to see what they don’t want to happen to them.
The neoliberal program has broken down in the West just as it has long since broken down for the Global South. Its central aim is to privatize the public sector. Yet for centuries the European capitalist takeoff was funded by industrial capitalists themselves aiming to lower the cost of production so that they could undersell other countries by government subsidy of tangible capital formation.
How can economies lower their cost of production? For starters, if companies are obliged to pay wages high enough for their workers to pay for their own health care and insurance, to pay for their own education, for their own debt-leveraged housing costs, the high price of paying a living wage will eat into industrial profits. To avoid this, European countries, like the United States, had their governments provide inexpensive basic needs so employers wouldn’t have to cover these costs.
The basic strategy of industrial capitalism was for governments to provide education, public health and basic infrastructure that otherwise would have been monopolized in private hands. Governments educated workers, trained them and helped raise their productivity by protecting and subsidizing capital investment. Governments provided water and electricity at subsidized rates so that labor would not have to spend its wages to buy high cost energy, high cost transportation and kindred basic needs. The result was to lower the break-even costs of labor, so that European and American industrialists could undersell other countries.
Image: Thames Water HQ By The Thames In Reading – Berkshire. (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Neoliberalism ended this seemingly obvious economic strategy. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan started a class war by the British and U.S. financial sectors against labor by privatizing their public utilities. Instead of England’s government providing clean water, which everybody needs to live, it sold off rent-seeking rights to financial managers raising prices to extract monopoly rents. To make matters worse, Thames Water and other privatized companies borrowed from banks and used the money to pay dividends to stockholders and buy their own stock to raise its prices to reap capital gains.
These rentier charges are now taking a big chunk out of the European wage earner’s budget. That makes employers pay higher wages. You can say the same thing for telephone service and other basic infrastructure utilities that now are privatized and financialized. Privatizing formerly subsidized telephone service and communications makes workers pay much more. The result is a wage squeeze, but also a profit squeeze because of the high cost of living and doing business in a rentier economy.
So since 1980, the whole European model – in fact, the whole model of industrial capitalism – has been reversed. Instead of industrial capitalism trying to cut the costs of production, minimizing what Marx called the false costs, the faux frais of production, prices charged by privatized infrastructure monopolies have gone way up. Labor’s living standards throughout Europe have been squeezed at the same time that their wages have had to be increased so that they can afford to pay for privatized services that used to be subsidized public services. Following the neoliberal model has made Europe uncompetitive, just as it has deindustrialized the U.S. economy.
The lesson for China has been to have socialism to restore the 19th-century industrial ethic that nearly all economic observers believed was leading to socialism of one kind or another. China’s living standards have soared, yet its wages are lower than that of the neoliberal economies thanks to the fact that socialism provides inexpensive transportation, public health care and so forth as described above.
Most important of all, socialist China creates its own money and controls its credit system. Instead of the Bank of China lending money to financial predators to buy companies and load them down with debt and drive their stock prices before leaving them as bankrupt shells like Thames Water in England, the government spends money directly into the economy. It’s overinvested in housing and real estate, to be sure, but it’s also invested in modernizing its high-speed railroads, modernizing its communication system, modernizing its cities, and above all its electronic internet system used for monetary payments. China has liberated itself from debt dependency on the West – and in the process, made the West dependent on it.
This could only have been done by government investment and regulation under a long-term plan. The Western financial model lives in the short run. If you’re going to allocate credit and resources to make fortunes by living in the short run by taking as much as you can as quickly as you can, you will not be able to make the capital investment to develop long-term growth. That’s why American information technology companies have not been able to keep up with their Chinese counterparts. Financialized “market forces” oblige them to use their income for stock buybacks and to pay out of dividends. That is the case with U.S. technology across the board.
China’s companies investing in information and internet technology plow their profits back into reinvestment in more research and development. Such innovation has shifted from the West to the East, which has rediscovered the logic of industrial capitalism developed by the 19th century’s classical political economists.
To be sure, China and other BRICS+ countries are trying to reinvent the wheel. They know that the Western model doesn’t work. The question is, what is the best alternative to neoliberalized, privatized and financialized economies?
It is amazing to me that there has been so little discussion of classical economics in the West. The value, price and rent theory of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and their contemporaries came to a head with Marx. That has left almost the only people talking about industrial capitalism’s economic reforms have been Marxists. Universities in America no longer teach the history of economic thought – or economic history, for that matter. It is as if there is only one kind of economy – the anti-government privatized “free market” that has taken over since the 1980s.
Students are taught that there is only one way to run an economy: the free enterprise neoliberal way. So when Asian and African countries send their students to the United States or England to study, they’re not taught about how industrial capitalism took off by raising wages and living standards to make labor more productive. Instead, the learn the economics of class war – from the employer’s short-term view.
Neoliberal trade theory is the most blatant example of today’s junk economics being awarded by Nobel Prizes as if that can somehow legitimize it. The result is the International Monetary Fund’s austerity plan masquerading as “stabilization plans.” Once a country like Argentina or Chile runs up a foreign debt, it is directed to obtain the money to pay this foreign debt by imposing anti-labor policies, dissolving labor unions, lowering wage levels while taxing labor (“consumers”) more, as if pauperized labor will make them competitive enough to earn enough export income to pay their foreign creditors.
When a policy like this has been shown to be destructive for the past century yet is still being imposed, it’s obvious that this is not an innocent error. You might call it a very successful error. It has succeeded in preventing the Global South from earning its way out of debt and from developing is own self-sufficiency in food and other basic needs. It has succeeded in creating domestic client oligarchies whose interests are to become agents of this Western NATO-centered model instead of seeking to develop their own economies.
It is to avoid this destiny that today’s geopolitical breakaway by the global majority in Asia, Africa and Latin America are moving to replace the finance-capitalist model. Their move to reinvent the wheel is following the logic of the original industrial capitalist takeoff that was evolving into socialism. If you look back to the late 19th century’s flowing of classical political economy, not only by Marx but by political parties across the political spectrum, we can see that there was going to be socialism of one kind or another.
What kind of socialism is it going to be? There was Christian socialism, libertarian socialism, Marxian socialism and other kinds of socialism. This classical literature and political debate was rich, but it came to an end with World War I. That was a disastrous turning point in Western civilization. The rentier classes, the landlords, the monopolists and the bankers had been fighting back against the industrial reforms that were happening in the most advanced industrial economies of Europe and the United States. The wealthy elites were terrified that support for these reforms would lead in Europe to a revolution like that created Soviet Russia. The West was even more terrified of what seemed to be happening in Germany that was looking like it was likely to go socialist.
The vested rentier interests, especially the wealthiest classes, feared that this threatened to end the ability of a wealthy financial oligarchy of the One Percent, maybe even five percent of the population. For the past century it has built up its financial wealth by forcing the rest of the economy into debt. The result has been a social malaise as Western populations in the United States and Europe, have come to believe that There Is No Alternative.
The lack of an alternative has enriched the One Percent. The U.S. economy has polarized, and so has Europe’s economies. The wealth of Europe, Italy included, has been sucked up to the very top, to the financial layer that has taken control of economic planning and public policy as if their privatized self-interest is more productive and efficient than an alternative that would raise labor’s living standards and self-reliance.
Financial elites throughout the world are a cosmopolitan class. It’s not only wealthy Italians but wealthy Europeans, wealthy Americans draining money from their own industrial sectors, the agricultural and the commercial sector. This stateless international class has its law of motion in its drive to force the entire global economy into debt so as to use its debt leverage to foreclose, above all on the assets of the public sector by getting governments into debt.
Backed by the IMF, World Banks and U.S. courts, international bondholders (including domestic oligarchies keeping their wealth outside of their own countries) force debtor governments to sell off public infrastructure. In the case of corporate debt, creditors foreclose on companies and break them into parts.
This behavior has de-industrialized the United States and Britain. Yet while the economies of the United States and Europe have gotten poorer and poorer, the wealthiest One Percent have got richer and richer. That’s why the United States and Europe have not joined the Global Majority but are trying to fight against its demonstration that there is a better alternative for civilization.
The NATO West’s ruling elites have overplayed their hand. By treating the rest of the world as an enemy for resisting U.S.-sponsored control, this diplomacy has driven other countries together to create an alternative. That alternative involves creating alternative institutions to the International Monetary Fund in a BRICS central bank to deal with inter-government balance of payments relations. It involves a new Bank for Economic Acceleration as an alternative to the World Bank, a bank to finance their own economic development by creating its own credit system to the global majority increase its infrastructure, agricultural and industrial investment. It also requires a new International Court of Justice to prevent oil companies and mining companies from polluting countries and resist being charged to pay for the cleanup costs that they’ve caused in their drive for quick natural-resource rents.
Ultimately, the Global Majority needs to create an alternative to the United Nations itself. All these institutions – the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank – are subject to American veto power. The United States has long announced that a central tenet of its foreign policy is that it will not join any institution that it can’t control by vetoing if they do something that does not benefit the United States.
In the last few days, President Putin has proposed creation of a BRICS parliament. The aim is to create a large group of countries that will design a new set of the rules of how an international economy should work. President Putin also said that the United Nations has a good set of rules, but the United States has vetoed their application in practice. The fact that the United Nations doesn’t have an army has left it powerless to resist the U.S., Ukrainian and Israeli violations of basic international law.
This emerging alternative BRICS group certainly will leave the United Nations to operate on the sidelines, but the “real” reformed United Nations will consist of the group of the global majority and its own set of institutions, acting as a unit in which the United States does not have veto power. That will transform the dynamic of how most of the world’s economies operate.
All this is an area that economists don’t talk about. Academic economics has become tunnel visioned, with simplistic ideas of government spending, inflation, money and credit, all without a concept of economic rent as unearned income to be minimized rather than made the foundation for financial fortunes.
The Western dynamic of “wealth creation” has been to raise real estate prices on credit. The middle class is told that it is getting richer as its housing prices rise, yet the effect is to prevent new wage-earners from joining the middle class unless they inherit their housing from their parents. The economic discipline no longer talks about how a country can actually enrich itself. So what the Global Majority needs is really a New Economics,
Luca Placidi: Thank you, Professor. There’s one other topic that is very important and that we are seeing at this moment. That is what is happening in Palestine, between Palestine and Israel and the war that they call “against Hamas” while they seek to drive out or destroy the entire Palestinian population.
Michael Hudson: When politicians from the United States to Germany and other European countries talk about the Ukrainian war or what is happening to Palestinians right now, there is a uniform a bipartisan alignment. Trump is saying what Biden is saying, and so is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That is to support Israel up to the end, and also Ukraine.
Yet the whole world has been shocked by the genocide that the Israelis are waging not only in Gaza but on the West Bank. Their brutality, the bombing of the hospitals, the assassination of reporters and journalists so that the world can’t see what is happening has catalyzed the world’s moral outrage that is setting its identity against that of the NATO West.
Image: The funeral of two Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
The attack against Palestinians is with American bombs, just as is the case with Ukraine’s and NATO’s attack on Russian-speaking territories. So it’s not simply Israel that is attacking Palestine. This is primarily an American attack. You can think of it as a logical extension of the U.S. attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria. The common denominator is the American view that Israel serves as a U.S. landed aircraft carrier to control Near Eastern oil. If the United States can maintain control of the Middle East and its oil trade, it will retain the power to turn off the power of other countries by cutting them off from oil. As I explained earlier, oil has been a key to American power for the past century.
That is the military reason why the United States is backing Israel in dropping American bombs on Gaza, while the U.S. intelligence spy network is telling them where to bomb. American strategists have long followed the strategy that in order to win, you have to bomb the hospitals first. The idea is not simply to kill the enemy population, but to cripple its members with anti-personal bombs to leave a lasting overhead cost in supporting women and men who are maimed for life. And most important is to bomb the children, so that they will not grow up to wreak retaliation.
The idea of making other Palestinians take care of crippled children who had their legs blown off or lost their arms is so inhuman, so against the most basic principle of civilization, that it has acted as a catalyst for other countries breaking away. On July 25, 2024, Israeli President Netanyahu was invited to the U.S. Congress to ask for its military support for his planned attack on Lebanon and his hope to drag America into an attack on Iran. He put the issue in a way that I think you and I can agree on: Having killed or wounded as many as 180,000 Palestinians in Gaza and accelerated settler murders and destruction of Palestinians and their property on the West Bank, he explained that, in words reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg: “This is not a clash of civilizations, it’s a clash between barbarism and civilization, between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”
I think that this is precisely what is at stake. Netanyahu and his neocon supporters in the U.S. Congress who invited him indeed have thrown down the military gauntlet threatening the world with yet new U.S. and Israeli violence against the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. Today’s buildup to such a war threatens the entire world with a new barbarism.
There already was a sort of tendency for the rest of the world, for Asia and the Global South to hope that somehow they could make do without making the enormous intellectual and moral break from the West. The feeling was that somehow they could survive through all this at least for the short run, as if things might somehow go back to some semblance of normal instead of continuing to polarize.
But what is happening in Israel the joint Israel-American attack on Palestine has shocked much of the world into realizing that this is what the United States might to do them, just as it’s what the US/NATO countries are doing to by fighting to the last Ukrainian. U.S. support for exterminating the Palestinians simply in order to use Israel as an arm to keep U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil is what is so abhorrent.
What is not to stop the Israelis from taking over Saudi Arabia and its oil, the Emirates, Kuwait, much as America did in Chile and Argentina to take over their minerals and land while assassinating labor leaders, land reformers and economics professors opposing Chicago School neoliberalism. The joint Israel and Ukraine wars have given a sense of urgency for other countries to realize that they have to act now in order to avoid a similar fate.
Other countries can’t simply be passive, because what is happening to the Palestinians can happen to all of them. That’s the degree to which Americans will go to maintain their global control. That’s why they are funding the Israeli attack on Palestine and the Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers. The Americans are providing the bombs and other weaponry, subsidizing their armies. This is what is creating the sense of urgency that is catalyzing the World Majority to realize that they must act more rapidly and decisively to make a real break.
Luca Placidi: Professor, I know that you’re extremely busy, so thank you very much. I want to thank you again, and I hope to have more time with you to go deeper on those topics. Thank you.
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you. I hope we’ll have a chance to have a follow-up for all of this.
Luca Placidi: We will, absolutely. Thank you very much.
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you again for having me.
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Luca Placidi: Welcome, everybody. It is a great pleasure and honor to have with us today Professor Michael Hudson. For those who still do not know him, Michael is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he is a researcher at the Levi Economics Institute at Bard College.
Just to mention a few works published with the help of technology, we want to recall Superimperialism, the Economic Strategy of the American Empire.
Its third edition came out in 2021. Then we have “… And Forgive Them Their Debts,” published in 2018.
The latest is The Collapse of Antiquity, published in 2023.
Michael is also a former Wall Street analyst, a political consultant, and is hosting the Geopolitical Economy Hour together with Radhika Desai, which is broadcast at Ben Norton’s YouTube channel, Geopolitical Economy Report.
Professor, welcome, and thanks again for being with us today.
Video: Prof. Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be able to speak to an Italian audience.
Luca Placidi: That is very good. Thank you. To kick off our conversation, would you agree that the Ukrainian war and even more the latest NATO summit with its final declaration are showing us that we are now back in a multipolar war, in which the global South it is opposed to the Western world?
Michael Hudson: Well, it’s more than just a geographic split. We’re really in a civilizational split, and it goes much deeper. What’s at stake is what kind of economy is the world going to have?
Is it going to be a financialized, neoliberal post-industrial economy, which is what the United States and Europe are pushing? Or is it going to be the kind of economy that textbooks talk about, where economies produce agricultural and industrial goods to feed themselves and make everybody prosper? I almost would use Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, Barbarism or Socialism, because the West no longer has the means of real economic control over trade and production. It only has military force, terrorist violence and corruption to maintain its control.
The NATO West does financial control by having loaded down the global South and even many Asian countries with dollarized debt for the last 70 years. That dollarized debt holds them in a financial neocolonialism, an international debt peonage. Besides that, the ultimate power that the United States and Europe have to maintain their unipolar control to prevent other countries from going their own way and pursuing their own interests is to bomb them and mobilize terrorism.
The NATO West has lost its basic industrial or agricultural control because it has outsourced its industry to China and other Asian economies, and its sanctions against Russia and other countries have obliged them to become self-sufficient instead of relying on the West for a widening range of their basic needs. So these countries are now in a position to use their labor, industry and agriculture to make themselves prosperous and regain control over their economies, not to make U.S. and European investors rich. They want to take control of their economies in a way that will raise their wages and living standards.
That can’t be done if they follow a policy of privatization, World Bank advice and the IMF’s instructions to sell off their land and raw materials, privatize and sell off their public infrastructure, communications, electrical systems and water rights to foreigners while getting rid of government regulation and social-support programs. The West’s demand is to let the private sector run everything without government “interference.” Well, there’s no way that any economy can grow and get prosperous without being a mixed economy with strong public infrastructure providing basic needs at non-monopoly prices.
There are many natural area for governments to operate more efficiently than the private sector. They can provide basic services that otherwise would be monopolized to charge extortionate prices to extract predatory monopoly rents for their owners. If a government doesn’t provide education, the result will be what’s happening in America, where the average cost of a college education is $40,000 or $50,000 a year. If you don’t have public health, you’re going to have a very expensive privatized health care that’s not available to everybody. In the United States that absorbs 18% of GDP, more than any other country. That kind of monopoly overhead doesn’t leave much room for the overall economy to be competitive with mixed public/private economies.
Most important, if you let money and credit be privatized by banks instead of doing what China has done and keep money as a public utility, then you let banks decide where the economy’s credit will be allocated. That makes them the economy’s central planners. Their preference is to supply credit not to finance industrial investment and growth, but to finance debt-leveraging to inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds, and for raiders to take over companies and empty them out, leaving debt-ridden shells in their place. like Thames Water in Britain, Sears Roebuck in the United States. That is what has been happening since the 1980s under Thatcherism and Reaganomics.
So the split between the West and the rest of the world, the global majority, is really about what kind of an economy most of the world will have. That’s why the United States is fighting so viciously to maintain its unipolar control. It’s fighting against the global majority today in the same way that it fought against the Soviet Union after 1917. It doesn’t want a rival kind of economic system to develop. So what we’re seeing is a split with the global majority that is trying to decide how to design an economy that’s going to help their member countries grow? That is the global fracture that is occurring, and it’s a civilizational break.
How are Global South countries to grow if they remain obliged to pay all of the dollarized foreign debts that they’ve been loaded down. These debts are the legacy of being obliged to follow destructive International Monetary Fund advice to impose austerity and to privatize and sell off their assets in the public domain in order to obtain the dollars to pay their foreign creditors? The Western model is thus basically a form of financial colonialism. Its anti-government philosophy has devastated the Wes’s economies as well as those of debtor countries.
The rest of the world thus has an object lesson in what to avoid if it does not want to end up looking like the United States, post-Thatcher/Blair Britain or Germany since its anti-Russia sanctions of2022. I’ve discussed this in The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism (2022). Today’s civilizational break is not only against Russia and China. You can trace the break back to the Bandung Conference of non-aligned nations in 1955, seventy years ago.
In 1955, what was called the Third World or non-aligned nations recognized that they were being made poorer and poorer by the rules of the world economy that American diplomats and geopolitical strategists institutionalized with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the dollar standard. That international trade and monetary system was exploitative, first and foremost against America’s potential rivals in Britain and other European countries, and against the former colonial systems of these countries that the United States sought to appropriate and exploit for its own benefit.
The post-World War II order has been a new kind of imperialism. It basically is a financial imperialism, not the European-style colonial imperialism enforced by a military occupation. Financial control has proved less costly and hence more efficient for the neoliberal mode of international exploitation. Non-aligned victim countries couldn’t break away in 1954 or since because Cuba, Indonesia and the other non-aligned nations were not large enough to “go it alone.” If they tried to go it alone, they would have ended up looking like Venezuela has looked like in the last few years, or like Cuba looked like after its revolution. If the United Sates and Europe had imposed such sanctions, countries resisting this system would have been obliged to surrender to the West to avoid economic disruption. But sanctions were not even necessary at that time under “free market” imperialism U.S.-style.
The United States was in a position to treat countries resisting this exploitation it as outcasts. Its threat was to tell countries that acted to protect their economies, and especially their public enterprise, that the West would isolate them if they tried to go it alone. Their economies were indeed too small, even on a regional level, to survive on their own. They felt that they needed U.S. support and that of its IMF and World Bank.
What has changed is the remarkable growth of socialist China since the 1990s and post-neoliberal Russia since the late 1990s under President Putin. Today for the first time, Eurasian nations have enough economic self-sufficiency outside of the United States and Europe to be able to go it alone. They no longer need to depend on the NATO West, which is losing its ability to economically control them.
In fact, it’s the NATO West that has become dependent on China, Russia and the rest of Eurasia, along with the Global South if its people can resist their own client oligarchies to throw off their financial chains and adherence to the self-serving U.S. “rules-based order.”
What is so ironic is that U.S. diplomacy itself is spurring their break-away. One might have expected that China, the Global South and India, Latin America and Africa came to realize just how they’re being exploited, they would have taken the lead in breaking away. Yet it is the United States and NATO that have driven them to break away, by imposing trade and financial sanctions that have forced them to go it alone.
Ever since the war in Ukraine by the United States to break Germany and Europe away from their trade and investment relations with Russia and China began in 2022, the United States has mobilized its European and other English-speaking dependencies to impose economic sanctions that has devastated economies obeying these policies. The backlash resulting from German de-industrialization and America’s elbowing aside France as an arms supplier (e.g., for submarine sales to AUKUS and in trying to replace France in its former African possessions) is driving other countries away. America and Europe have isolated themselves from the Global Majority, replacing its prosperous trade and investment with Russia and China with economic dependency on the United States for oil and other higher-priced imports.
What’s so amazing is how self-destructive of its own global empire U.S. diplomacy has been. The focus of U.S. diplomacy on locking in its control over Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea by obliging them to join its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sanctions has obliged these designated U.S. enemies to replacing trade dependency on the West with their own mutual self-dependency.
They realize that they can never depend on the United Stats and European satellites for imports again. That should have been obvious to U.S. strategists. Once a country is blocked from importing its food, what’s it going to do? It’s going to grow its own food. When the United States imposed sanctions on Russia to block European exports of food to it, for instance, Russia was driven to produce its own butter, crops and other food instead of importing it from the Baltics and other former suppliers. And when U.S. officials demanded that its allies stop exporting computer chips to China, it moved quickly to develop its own domestic supply.
Other countries can’t depend on the United States or Europe for their food because they may be cut off again. So they’ll have to become self-sufficient. They can’t depend on the NATO West for industry or technology because it can try to disrupt their economy by interrupting their supply chains to force it to follow pro-NATO policies. As for Europe, it is left dependent on the United States now that it has let itself be isolated from Eurasia and the Global South.
The global fracture that is occurring in today’s world is not reversible. And it is all happening so quickly. Once a market is lost to countries able to free themselves and provide their own basic needs, that market is not recoverable. If the United States and NATO Europe stops exporting food and industrial products to sanctioned countries, they will make these products themselves. So when you sanction a country, it’s as if you’ve provided them with tariff protection to nurture their own production. That’s the “infant industry” argument that enabled the United States to rise to industrial power in the late 19th century. The logic was clearly spelled out by U.S. strategists. (I summarize this strategy in America’s Protective Takeoff: 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (2010). Needless to say, U.S. neoliberal rhetoric has sought to erase this history so as to “pull up the ladder” so that its logic will not be used by other countries to emulate the U.S. economic success – the same government sponsorship of industry that made Germany, France and other countries so successful since the 19th century.
Latin America and Africa are seeing that it is time to liberate their economic from “free-trade imperialism.” Instead of using their agricultural land to export plantation crops to the North, they’re going to use their land to begin feeding themselves with their own grain, their own rice and other food crops so that they no longer have to depend on American and European farm exports.
The U.S. policy of bullying countries by imposing trade sanctions has cut its own economic throat, so to speak. It’s almost humorous to see it dismantle the free-trade imperialism and dollar dependency that earlier generations of U.S. diplomacy tried so hard to impose on the rest of the world.
The meetings this year by the BRICS+ countries under Russian leadership this year and China next year are all about how to plan a trajectory for becoming independent from reliance on the West. That is what U.S. diplomacy itself has driven them to do.
Luca Placidi: As you were saying, Professor, it seems like the TINA Paradigm has been destroyed because now we have alternatives. It seems that the European political class is hopelessly submissive to the U.S. agenda. This is really disturbing, at least for us in Europe, because the war in Ukraine has destroyed the European economy.
Just think, as you’ve described, how the impact of the sanctions has penalized industrial production especially in Germany and Italy. Yet this has not been enough for Europe to reverse course and pull out of this conflict.
Michael Hudson: I think that you could call the war in Ukraine since 2022 an American war against Europe, because the great loser has been Germany, Italy, France and the rest of Europe. The United States has seen the writing on the wall and decided that if there’s going to be a fight between North America along with NATO against the rest of the world, it had better start by solidifying its control over Europe as a profitable market and debtor instead of its turning to Asia and being lost by the United States.
Image: Half a million tons of methane rise from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline. (Photo: Swedish Coast Guard)
Essentially, U.S. strategists are acknowledging that they know that America is not able to produce a real industrial surplus anymore. Its neoliberal trade policy has outsourced its industry to Asia. The only new market that it can secure if the Global Majority breaks away is that of Europe. That explains why the United States arranged for the Nord Stream pipeline to be blown up, and convinced Europe voluntarily to commit economic self-destruction by not buying low-priced Russian gas, oil and raw materials. While this has driven Russia and China together with their Asian neighbors, the losers have been European.
German industry has been moving out of the country to the United States and elsewhere for lower-cost energy. It’s been emigrating largely to the United States, making it the beneficiary. If you’re a German industrial company, what else are you going to do if its economy is shrinking?
If you look at labor productivity over the last hundred years, it goes parallel with energy use per worker. Energy is really the key. That’s why a centra; aim of American foreign policy since 1945 has been to control other countries in two ways, starting with oil. The United States, along with Britain and Holland, have controlled the world oil trade so that they can turn off the electricity, turn off the lights of countries that try to break away and act in their own self-interest.
Along with oil, the second tactic that America has used is to control grain and food. Let independent countries starve in the dark. But here once again, the sanctions have mainly been to make Europe suffer. Remember, America has fought against the European Economic Community ever since it was created in 1958. From the outset, America fought against the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). But for the EEC, the most important aim of integration was to protect its farmers and do for European agriculture what America had done for its agriculture.
Agricultural price supports enabled capital investment to raise farm productivity. Europe rationalized its agriculture and increased its capital investment to make it more productive. The result was that Europe has not only replaced its dependence on American food exports, but has become a major agricultural exporter. But now the expanded European Union is now suffering because of the sanctions not only against importing Russian gas to make fertilizer. And by supporting Ukraine, Europe is letting it dump its low-cost grain in Poland and other countries. Farmers already have staged riots to protest against their farm markets being undersold by the Ukrainians – with U.S. investors trying to buy up this land. That could roll back European agricultural independence and make it dependent once more on the United States or on countries that U.S. investors control.
The effect of this Cold War III so far has been to drive Europe back into the American orbit. The United States insists that there’s no alternative to this neoliberal geopolitics. Western textbooks indoctrinate students to believe that neoliberalism is the best way to run an economy efficiently – by not having a government to protect self-reliance and living standards, not to regulate against predatory monopoly and financial rent-seeking. The aim is to let capitalism evolve into monopoly capitalism, which is really finance capitalism, because monopolies are organized by the financial sector as “the mother of trusts.”
Although the United States has said there’s no alternative, there obviously is. But if countries don’t follow an alternative, they’re going to end up looking like Germany. In fact, what’s happened to Europe as a result of the war in Ukraine and U.S. sanctions is an object lesson for other countries to see what they don’t want to happen to them.
The neoliberal program has broken down in the West just as it has long since broken down for the Global South. Its central aim is to privatize the public sector. Yet for centuries the European capitalist takeoff was funded by industrial capitalists themselves aiming to lower the cost of production so that they could undersell other countries by government subsidy of tangible capital formation.
How can economies lower their cost of production? For starters, if companies are obliged to pay wages high enough for their workers to pay for their own health care and insurance, to pay for their own education, for their own debt-leveraged housing costs, the high price of paying a living wage will eat into industrial profits. To avoid this, European countries, like the United States, had their governments provide inexpensive basic needs so employers wouldn’t have to cover these costs.
The basic strategy of industrial capitalism was for governments to provide education, public health and basic infrastructure that otherwise would have been monopolized in private hands. Governments educated workers, trained them and helped raise their productivity by protecting and subsidizing capital investment. Governments provided water and electricity at subsidized rates so that labor would not have to spend its wages to buy high cost energy, high cost transportation and kindred basic needs. The result was to lower the break-even costs of labor, so that European and American industrialists could undersell other countries.
Image: Thames Water HQ By The Thames In Reading – Berkshire. (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Neoliberalism ended this seemingly obvious economic strategy. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan started a class war by the British and U.S. financial sectors against labor by privatizing their public utilities. Instead of England’s government providing clean water, which everybody needs to live, it sold off rent-seeking rights to financial managers raising prices to extract monopoly rents. To make matters worse, Thames Water and other privatized companies borrowed from banks and used the money to pay dividends to stockholders and buy their own stock to raise its prices to reap capital gains.
These rentier charges are now taking a big chunk out of the European wage earner’s budget. That makes employers pay higher wages. You can say the same thing for telephone service and other basic infrastructure utilities that now are privatized and financialized. Privatizing formerly subsidized telephone service and communications makes workers pay much more. The result is a wage squeeze, but also a profit squeeze because of the high cost of living and doing business in a rentier economy.
So since 1980, the whole European model – in fact, the whole model of industrial capitalism – has been reversed. Instead of industrial capitalism trying to cut the costs of production, minimizing what Marx called the false costs, the faux frais of production, prices charged by privatized infrastructure monopolies have gone way up. Labor’s living standards throughout Europe have been squeezed at the same time that their wages have had to be increased so that they can afford to pay for privatized services that used to be subsidized public services. Following the neoliberal model has made Europe uncompetitive, just as it has deindustrialized the U.S. economy.
The lesson for China has been to have socialism to restore the 19th-century industrial ethic that nearly all economic observers believed was leading to socialism of one kind or another. China’s living standards have soared, yet its wages are lower than that of the neoliberal economies thanks to the fact that socialism provides inexpensive transportation, public health care and so forth as described above.
Most important of all, socialist China creates its own money and controls its credit system. Instead of the Bank of China lending money to financial predators to buy companies and load them down with debt and drive their stock prices before leaving them as bankrupt shells like Thames Water in England, the government spends money directly into the economy. It’s overinvested in housing and real estate, to be sure, but it’s also invested in modernizing its high-speed railroads, modernizing its communication system, modernizing its cities, and above all its electronic internet system used for monetary payments. China has liberated itself from debt dependency on the West – and in the process, made the West dependent on it.
This could only have been done by government investment and regulation under a long-term plan. The Western financial model lives in the short run. If you’re going to allocate credit and resources to make fortunes by living in the short run by taking as much as you can as quickly as you can, you will not be able to make the capital investment to develop long-term growth. That’s why American information technology companies have not been able to keep up with their Chinese counterparts. Financialized “market forces” oblige them to use their income for stock buybacks and to pay out of dividends. That is the case with U.S. technology across the board.
China’s companies investing in information and internet technology plow their profits back into reinvestment in more research and development. Such innovation has shifted from the West to the East, which has rediscovered the logic of industrial capitalism developed by the 19th century’s classical political economists.
To be sure, China and other BRICS+ countries are trying to reinvent the wheel. They know that the Western model doesn’t work. The question is, what is the best alternative to neoliberalized, privatized and financialized economies?
It is amazing to me that there has been so little discussion of classical economics in the West. The value, price and rent theory of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and their contemporaries came to a head with Marx. That has left almost the only people talking about industrial capitalism’s economic reforms have been Marxists. Universities in America no longer teach the history of economic thought – or economic history, for that matter. It is as if there is only one kind of economy – the anti-government privatized “free market” that has taken over since the 1980s.
Students are taught that there is only one way to run an economy: the free enterprise neoliberal way. So when Asian and African countries send their students to the United States or England to study, they’re not taught about how industrial capitalism took off by raising wages and living standards to make labor more productive. Instead, the learn the economics of class war – from the employer’s short-term view.
Neoliberal trade theory is the most blatant example of today’s junk economics being awarded by Nobel Prizes as if that can somehow legitimize it. The result is the International Monetary Fund’s austerity plan masquerading as “stabilization plans.” Once a country like Argentina or Chile runs up a foreign debt, it is directed to obtain the money to pay this foreign debt by imposing anti-labor policies, dissolving labor unions, lowering wage levels while taxing labor (“consumers”) more, as if pauperized labor will make them competitive enough to earn enough export income to pay their foreign creditors.
When a policy like this has been shown to be destructive for the past century yet is still being imposed, it’s obvious that this is not an innocent error. You might call it a very successful error. It has succeeded in preventing the Global South from earning its way out of debt and from developing is own self-sufficiency in food and other basic needs. It has succeeded in creating domestic client oligarchies whose interests are to become agents of this Western NATO-centered model instead of seeking to develop their own economies.
It is to avoid this destiny that today’s geopolitical breakaway by the global majority in Asia, Africa and Latin America are moving to replace the finance-capitalist model. Their move to reinvent the wheel is following the logic of the original industrial capitalist takeoff that was evolving into socialism. If you look back to the late 19th century’s flowing of classical political economy, not only by Marx but by political parties across the political spectrum, we can see that there was going to be socialism of one kind or another.
What kind of socialism is it going to be? There was Christian socialism, libertarian socialism, Marxian socialism and other kinds of socialism. This classical literature and political debate was rich, but it came to an end with World War I. That was a disastrous turning point in Western civilization. The rentier classes, the landlords, the monopolists and the bankers had been fighting back against the industrial reforms that were happening in the most advanced industrial economies of Europe and the United States. The wealthy elites were terrified that support for these reforms would lead in Europe to a revolution like that created Soviet Russia. The West was even more terrified of what seemed to be happening in Germany that was looking like it was likely to go socialist.
The vested rentier interests, especially the wealthiest classes, feared that this threatened to end the ability of a wealthy financial oligarchy of the One Percent, maybe even five percent of the population. For the past century it has built up its financial wealth by forcing the rest of the economy into debt. The result has been a social malaise as Western populations in the United States and Europe, have come to believe that There Is No Alternative.
The lack of an alternative has enriched the One Percent. The U.S. economy has polarized, and so has Europe’s economies. The wealth of Europe, Italy included, has been sucked up to the very top, to the financial layer that has taken control of economic planning and public policy as if their privatized self-interest is more productive and efficient than an alternative that would raise labor’s living standards and self-reliance.
Financial elites throughout the world are a cosmopolitan class. It’s not only wealthy Italians but wealthy Europeans, wealthy Americans draining money from their own industrial sectors, the agricultural and the commercial sector. This stateless international class has its law of motion in its drive to force the entire global economy into debt so as to use its debt leverage to foreclose, above all on the assets of the public sector by getting governments into debt.
Backed by the IMF, World Banks and U.S. courts, international bondholders (including domestic oligarchies keeping their wealth outside of their own countries) force debtor governments to sell off public infrastructure. In the case of corporate debt, creditors foreclose on companies and break them into parts.
This behavior has de-industrialized the United States and Britain. Yet while the economies of the United States and Europe have gotten poorer and poorer, the wealthiest One Percent have got richer and richer. That’s why the United States and Europe have not joined the Global Majority but are trying to fight against its demonstration that there is a better alternative for civilization.
The NATO West’s ruling elites have overplayed their hand. By treating the rest of the world as an enemy for resisting U.S.-sponsored control, this diplomacy has driven other countries together to create an alternative. That alternative involves creating alternative institutions to the International Monetary Fund in a BRICS central bank to deal with inter-government balance of payments relations. It involves a new Bank for Economic Acceleration as an alternative to the World Bank, a bank to finance their own economic development by creating its own credit system to the global majority increase its infrastructure, agricultural and industrial investment. It also requires a new International Court of Justice to prevent oil companies and mining companies from polluting countries and resist being charged to pay for the cleanup costs that they’ve caused in their drive for quick natural-resource rents.
Ultimately, the Global Majority needs to create an alternative to the United Nations itself. All these institutions – the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank – are subject to American veto power. The United States has long announced that a central tenet of its foreign policy is that it will not join any institution that it can’t control by vetoing if they do something that does not benefit the United States.
In the last few days, President Putin has proposed creation of a BRICS parliament. The aim is to create a large group of countries that will design a new set of the rules of how an international economy should work. President Putin also said that the United Nations has a good set of rules, but the United States has vetoed their application in practice. The fact that the United Nations doesn’t have an army has left it powerless to resist the U.S., Ukrainian and Israeli violations of basic international law.
This emerging alternative BRICS group certainly will leave the United Nations to operate on the sidelines, but the “real” reformed United Nations will consist of the group of the global majority and its own set of institutions, acting as a unit in which the United States does not have veto power. That will transform the dynamic of how most of the world’s economies operate.
All this is an area that economists don’t talk about. Academic economics has become tunnel visioned, with simplistic ideas of government spending, inflation, money and credit, all without a concept of economic rent as unearned income to be minimized rather than made the foundation for financial fortunes.
The Western dynamic of “wealth creation” has been to raise real estate prices on credit. The middle class is told that it is getting richer as its housing prices rise, yet the effect is to prevent new wage-earners from joining the middle class unless they inherit their housing from their parents. The economic discipline no longer talks about how a country can actually enrich itself. So what the Global Majority needs is really a New Economics,
Luca Placidi: Thank you, Professor. There’s one other topic that is very important and that we are seeing at this moment. That is what is happening in Palestine, between Palestine and Israel and the war that they call “against Hamas” while they seek to drive out or destroy the entire Palestinian population.
Michael Hudson: When politicians from the United States to Germany and other European countries talk about the Ukrainian war or what is happening to Palestinians right now, there is a uniform a bipartisan alignment. Trump is saying what Biden is saying, and so is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That is to support Israel up to the end, and also Ukraine.
Yet the whole world has been shocked by the genocide that the Israelis are waging not only in Gaza but on the West Bank. Their brutality, the bombing of the hospitals, the assassination of reporters and journalists so that the world can’t see what is happening has catalyzed the world’s moral outrage that is setting its identity against that of the NATO West.
Image: The funeral of two Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
The attack against Palestinians is with American bombs, just as is the case with Ukraine’s and NATO’s attack on Russian-speaking territories. So it’s not simply Israel that is attacking Palestine. This is primarily an American attack. You can think of it as a logical extension of the U.S. attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria. The common denominator is the American view that Israel serves as a U.S. landed aircraft carrier to control Near Eastern oil. If the United States can maintain control of the Middle East and its oil trade, it will retain the power to turn off the power of other countries by cutting them off from oil. As I explained earlier, oil has been a key to American power for the past century.
That is the military reason why the United States is backing Israel in dropping American bombs on Gaza, while the U.S. intelligence spy network is telling them where to bomb. American strategists have long followed the strategy that in order to win, you have to bomb the hospitals first. The idea is not simply to kill the enemy population, but to cripple its members with anti-personal bombs to leave a lasting overhead cost in supporting women and men who are maimed for life. And most important is to bomb the children, so that they will not grow up to wreak retaliation.
The idea of making other Palestinians take care of crippled children who had their legs blown off or lost their arms is so inhuman, so against the most basic principle of civilization, that it has acted as a catalyst for other countries breaking away. On July 25, 2024, Israeli President Netanyahu was invited to the U.S. Congress to ask for its military support for his planned attack on Lebanon and his hope to drag America into an attack on Iran. He put the issue in a way that I think you and I can agree on: Having killed or wounded as many as 180,000 Palestinians in Gaza and accelerated settler murders and destruction of Palestinians and their property on the West Bank, he explained that, in words reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg: “This is not a clash of civilizations, it’s a clash between barbarism and civilization, between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”
I think that this is precisely what is at stake. Netanyahu and his neocon supporters in the U.S. Congress who invited him indeed have thrown down the military gauntlet threatening the world with yet new U.S. and Israeli violence against the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. Today’s buildup to such a war threatens the entire world with a new barbarism.
There already was a sort of tendency for the rest of the world, for Asia and the Global South to hope that somehow they could make do without making the enormous intellectual and moral break from the West. The feeling was that somehow they could survive through all this at least for the short run, as if things might somehow go back to some semblance of normal instead of continuing to polarize.
But what is happening in Israel the joint Israel-American attack on Palestine has shocked much of the world into realizing that this is what the United States might to do them, just as it’s what the US/NATO countries are doing to by fighting to the last Ukrainian. U.S. support for exterminating the Palestinians simply in order to use Israel as an arm to keep U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil is what is so abhorrent.
What is not to stop the Israelis from taking over Saudi Arabia and its oil, the Emirates, Kuwait, much as America did in Chile and Argentina to take over their minerals and land while assassinating labor leaders, land reformers and economics professors opposing Chicago School neoliberalism. The joint Israel and Ukraine wars have given a sense of urgency for other countries to realize that they have to act now in order to avoid a similar fate.
Other countries can’t simply be passive, because what is happening to the Palestinians can happen to all of them. That’s the degree to which Americans will go to maintain their global control. That’s why they are funding the Israeli attack on Palestine and the Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers. The Americans are providing the bombs and other weaponry, subsidizing their armies. This is what is creating the sense of urgency that is catalyzing the World Majority to realize that they must act more rapidly and decisively to make a real break.
Luca Placidi: Professor, I know that you’re extremely busy, so thank you very much. I want to thank you again, and I hope to have more time with you to go deeper on those topics. Thank you.
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you. I hope we’ll have a chance to have a follow-up for all of this.
Luca Placidi: We will, absolutely. Thank you very much.
Michael Hudson: Well, thank you again for having me.
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Der Friedensstifter 