Yves here. American diplomacy has become an oxymoron. Michael Hudson explains that what the US likes to depict as promoting democracy is actually extending the reach of neoliberalism. And while we once offered some carrots as part of the process, it now appears that America is in “The beatings will continue until morale improves” mode.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization. Originally published at his website
As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.
Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.
What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear. Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19thand early 20thcentury.
Clausewitz popularized the axiom that war is an extension of national interests – mainly economic. The United States views its economic interest to lie in seeking to spread its neoliberal ideology globally. The evangelistic aim is to financialize and privatize economies by shifting planning away from national governments to a cosmopolitan financial sector. There would be little need for politics in such a world. Economic planning would shift from political capitals to financial centers, from Washington to Wall Street, with satellites in the City of London, the Paris Bourse, Frankfurt and Tokyo. Board meetings for the new oligarchy would be held at Davos’s World Economic Forum. Hitherto public infrastructure services would be privatized and priced high enough to include profits (and indeed, monopoly rents), debt financing and management fees rather than being publicly subsidized. Debt service and rent would become the major overhead costs for families, industry and governments.
The U.S. drive to retain its unipolar power to impose “America First” financial, trade and military policies on the world involves an inherent hostility toward all countries seeking to follow their own national interests. Having less and less to offer in the form of mutual economic gains, U.S. policy makes threats of sanctions and covert meddling in foreign politics. The U.S. dream envisions a Chinese version of Boris Yeltsin replacing the nation’s Communist Party leadership and selling off its public domain to the highest bidder – presumably after a monetary crisis wipes out domestic purchasing power much as occurred in post-Soviet Russia, leaving the international financial community as buyers.
Russia and President Putin cannot be forgiven for having fought back against the Harvard Boys’ “reforms.” That is why U.S. officials planned how to create Russian economic disruption to (they hope) orchestrate a “color revolution” to recapture Russia for the world’s neoliberal camp. That is the character of the “democracy” and “free markets” being juxtaposed to the “autocracy” of state-subsidized growth. As Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov explained in a press conference on July 20, 2022 regarding Ukraine’s violent coup in 2014, U.S. and other Western officials define military coups as democratic if they are sponsored by the United States in the hope of promoting neoliberal policies.
Do you remember how events developed after the coup? The putschists spat in the face of Germany, France and Poland that were the guarantors of the agreement with Viktor Yanukovych. It was trampled underfoot the next morning. These European countries didn’t make a peep – they reconciled themselves to this. A couple of years ago I asked the Germans and French what they thought about the coup. What was it all about if they didn’t demand that the putschists fulfil the agreements? They replied: “This is the cost of the democratic process.” I am not kidding. Amazing – these were adults holding the post of foreign ministers.[1]
This Doublethink vocabulary reflects how far mainstream ideology has evolved from Rosa Luxemburg’s description a century ago of the civilizational choice being posed: barbarism or socialism.
The Contradictory U.S. and European Interests and Burdens of the War in Ukraine
To return to Clausewitz’s view of war as an extension of national policy, U.S. national interests are diverging sharply from those of its NATO satellites. America’s military-industrial complex, oil and agriculture sectors are benefiting, while European industrial interests are suffering. That is especially the case in Germany and Italy as a result of their governments blocking North Stream 2 gas imports and other Russian raw materials.
The interruption of world energy, food and minerals supply chains and the resulting price inflation (providing an umbrella for monopoly rents by non-Russian suppliers) has imposed enormous economic strains on U.S. allies in Europe and the Global South. Yet the U.S. economy is benefiting from this, or at least specific sectors of the U.S. economy are benefiting. As Sergey Lavrov, pointed out in his above-cited press conference:“The European economy is impacted more than anything else. The stats show that 40 percent of the damage caused by sanctions is borne by the EU whereas the damage to the United States is less than 1 percent.” The dollar’s exchange rate has soared against the euro, which has plunged to parity with the dollar and looks set to fall further down toward the $0.80 that it was a generation ago. U.S. dominance over Europe is further strengthened by the trade sanctions against Russian oil and gas. The U.S. is an LNG exporter, U.S. companies control the world oil trade, and U.S. firms are the world’s major grain marketers and exporters now that Russia is excluded from many foreign markets.
A Revival of European Military Spending – for Offense, not Defense
U.S. arms-makers are looking forward to making profits off arms sales to Western Europe, which has almost literally disarmed itself by sending its tanks and howitzers, ammunition and missiles to Ukraine. U.S. politicians support a bellicose foreign policy to promote arms factories that employ labor in their voting districts. And the neocons who dominate the State Department and CIA see the war as a means of asserting American dominance over the world economy, starting with its own NATO partners.
The problem with this view is that although America’s military-industrial, oil and agricultural monopolies are benefitting, the rest of the U.S. economy is being squeezed by the inflationary pressures resulting from boycotting Russian gas, grain and other raw-materials exports, and the enormous rise in the military budget will be used as an excuse to cut back social spending programs. That also is a problem for Eurozone members. They have promised NATO to raise their military spending to the stipulated 2 percent of their GDP, and the Americans are urging much higher levels to upgrade to the most recent array of weaponry. All but forgotten is the Peace Dividend that was promised in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved the Warsaw Pact alliance, expecting that NATO likewise would have little reason to exist.
Russia has no discernable economic interest in mounting a new occupation of Central Europe. That would offer no gain to Russia, as its leaders realized when they dissolved the old Soviet Union. In fact, no industrial country in today’s world can afford to field an infantry to occupy an enemy. All that NATO can do is bomb from a distance. It can destroy, but not occupy. The United States found that out in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. And just as the assassination Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo (now Bosnia-Herzegovina) triggered World War I in 1914, NATO’s bombing of adjoining Serbia may be viewed as throwing down the gauntlet to turn Cold War 2 into a veritable World War III. That marked the point at which NATO became an offensive alliance, not a defensive one.
How does this reflect European interests? Why should Europe re-arm, if the only effect is to make it a target of retaliation in the event of further attacks on Russia? What does Europe have to gain in becoming a larger customer for America’s military-industrial complex? Diverting spending to rebuild an offensive army – that can never be used without triggering an atomic response that would wipe out Europe – will limit the social spending needed to cope with today’s Covid problems and economic recession.
The only lasting leverage a nation can offer in today’s world is trade and technology transfer. Europe has more of this to offer than the United States. Yet the only opposition to renewed military spending is coming from right-wing parties and the German Linke party. Europe’s Social Democratic, Socialist and Labour parties share American neoliberal ideology.
Sanctions Against Russian Gas Makes Coal “The Fuel of the Future”
The carbon footprint of bombing, arms manufacturing and military bases is strikingly absent from today’s discussion about global warming and the need to cut back on carbon emissions. The German party that calls itself Green is leading the campaign for sanctions against importing Russian oil and gas, which electric utilities are replacing with Polish coal and even German lignite. Coal is becoming the “fuel of the future.” Its price also is soaring in the United States, benefitting American coal companies.
In contrast to the Paris Club agreements to reduce carbon emissions, the United States has neither the political capability nor the intention to join the conservation effort. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Executive Branch has no authority to issue nation-wide energy rules; only individual states can do that, unless Congress passes a national law to cut back on fossil fuels.
That seems unlikely in view of the fact that becoming head of a Democratic Senate and Congressional committee requires being a leader in raising campaign contributions for the party. Joe Manchin, a coal-company billionaire, leads all senators in campaign support from the oil and coal industries, enabling him to win his party’s auction for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee chairmanship and block any seriously restrictive environmental legislation.
Next to oil, agriculture is a major contributor to the U.S. balance of payments. Blocking Russian grain and fertilizer shipping threatens to create a Global South food crisis as well as a European crisis as gas is unavailable to make domestic fertilizer. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of grain and also of fertilizer, and its exports of these products have been exempted from NATO sanctions. But Russian shipping was blocked by Ukraine placing mines in the sea lanes through the Black Sea to close off access to Odessa’s harbor, hoping that the world would blame the world’s imminent grain and energy crisis on Russia instead of the US/NATO trade sanctions imposed on Russia.[2]At his July 20, 2022 press conference Sergey Lavrov showed the hypocrisy of the public relations attempt to distort matters:
For many months, they told us that Russia was to blame for the food crisis because the sanctions don’t cover food and fertiliser. Therefore, Russia doesn’t need to find ways to avoid the sanctions and so it should trade because nobody stands in its way. It took us a lot of time to explain to them that, although food and fertiliser are not subject to sanctions, the first and second packages of Western restrictions affected freight costs, insurance premiums, permissions for Russian ships carrying these goods to dock at foreign ports and those for foreign ships taking on the same consignments at Russian harbours. They are openly lying to us that this is not true, and that it is up to Russia alone. This is foul play.
Black Sea grain transport has begun to resume, but NATO countries have blocked payments to Russia in dollars, euros or currencies of other countries in the U.S. orbit. Food-deficit countries that cannot afford to pay distress-level food prices face drastic shortages, which will be exacerbated when they are compelled to pay their foreign debts denominated in the appreciating U.S. dollar. The looming fuel and food crisis promises to drive a new wave of immigrants to Europe seeking survival. Europe already has been flooded with refugees from NATO’s bombing and backing of jihadist attacks on Libya and Near Eastern oil-producing countries. This year’s proxy war in Ukraine and imposition of anti-Russian sanctions is a perfect illustration of Henry Kissinger’s quip: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
Blowback from the US/NATO Miscalculations
America’s international diplomacy aims to dictate financial, trade and military policies that will lock other countries into dollar debt and trade dependency by preventing them from developing alternatives. If this fails, America seeks to isolate the recalcitrants from the U.S.-centered Western sphere.
America’s foreign diplomacy no longer is based on offering mutual gain. Such could be claimed in the aftermath of World War II when the United States was in a position to offer loans, foreign-aid and military protection against occupation – as well as manufactures to rebuild war-torn economies – to governments in exchange for their accepting trade and monetary policies favorable to American exporters and investors. But today there is only the belligerent diplomacy of threatening to hurt nations whose socialist governments reject America’s neoliberal drive to privatize and sell off their natural resources and public infrastructure.
The first aim is to prevent Russia and China from helping each other. This is the old imperial divide-and-conquer strategy. Minimizing Russia’s ability to support China would pave the way for the United States and NATO Europe to impose new trade sanctions on China, and to send jihadists to its western Xinjiang Uighur region. The aim is to bleed Russia’s armaments inventory, kill enough of its soldiers, and create enough Russian shortages and suffering to not only weaken its ability to help China, but to spur its population to support a regime change, an American-sponsored “color revolution.” The dream is to promote a Yeltsin-like leader friendly to the neoliberal “therapy” that dismantled Russia’s economy in the 1990s.
Amazing as it may seem, U.S. strategists did not anticipate the obvious response by countries finding themselves together in the crosshairs of US/NATO military and economic threats. On July 19, 2022, the presidents of Russia and Iran met to announce their cooperation in the face of the sanctions war against them. That followed Russia’s earlier meeting with India’s Prime Minister Modi. In what has been characterized as “shooting itself in its own foot,” U.S. diplomacy is driving Russia, China, India and Iran together, and indeed to reach out to Argentina and other countries to join the BRICS-plus bank to protect themselves.
The U.S. Itself Is Ending the Dollar Standard of International Finance
The Trump Administration took a major step to drive countries out of the dollar orbit in November 2018, by confiscating nearly $2 billion of Venezuela’s official gold stock held in London. The Bank of England put these reserves at the disposal of Juan Guaidó, the marginal right-wing politician selected by the United States to replace Venezuela’s elected president as head of state. This was defined as being democratic, because the regime change promised to introduce the neoliberal “free market” that is deemed to be the essence of America’s definition of democracy for today’s world.
This gold theft actually was not the first such confiscation. On November 14, 1979, the Carter Administration paralyzed Iran’s bank deposits in New York after the Shah was overthrown. This act blocked Iran from paying its scheduled foreign debt service, forcing it into default. That was viewed as an exceptional one-time action as far as all other financial markets were concerned. But now that the United States is the self-proclaimed “exceptional nation,” such confiscations are becoming a new norm in U.S. diplomacy. Nobody yet knows what happened to Libya’s gold reserves that Muammar Gadafi had intended to be used to back an African alternative to the dollar. And Afghanistan’s gold and other reserves were simply taken by Washington as payment for the cost of “freeing” that country from Russian control by backing the Taliban. But when the Biden Administration and its NATO allies made a much larger asset grab of some $300 billion of Russia’s foreign bank reserves and currency holdings in March 2022, it made official a radical new epoch in Dollar Diplomacy. Any nation that follows policies not deemed to be in the interests of the U.S. Government runs the risk of U.S. authorities confiscating its holdings of foreign reserves in U.S. banks or securities.
This was a red flag leading countries to fear denominating their trade, savings and foreign debt in dollars, and to avoid using dollar or euro bank deposits and securities as a means of payment. By prompting other countries to think about how to free themselves from the U.S.-centered world trade and monetary system that was established in 1945 with the IMF, World Bank and subsequently the World Trade Organization, the U.S. confiscations have accelerated the end of the U.S. Treasury-bill standard that has governed world finance since the United States went off gold in 1971.[3]
Since dollar convertibility into gold ended in August 1971, dollarization of the world’s trade and investment has created a need for other countries to hold most of their new international monetary reserves in U.S. Treasury securities and bank deposits. As already noted, that enables the United States to seize foreign bank deposits and bonds denominated in U.S. dollars.
Most important, the United States can create and spend dollar IOUs into the world economy at will, without limit. It doesn’t have to earn international spending power by running a trade surplus, as other countries have to do. The U.S. Treasury can simply print dollars electronically to finance its foreign military spending and purchases of foreign resources and companies. And being the “exceptional country,” it doesn’t have to pay these debts – which are recognized as being far too large to be paid. Foreign dollar holdings are free U.S. credit to the Unites States, not requiring repayment any more than the paper dollars in our wallets are expected to be paid off (by retiring them from circulation). What seems to be so self-destructive about America’s economic sanctions and confiscations of Russian and other foreign reserves is that they are accelerating the demise of this free ride.
Blowback Resulting from US/NATO Isolating Their Economic and Monetary Systems
It is hard to see how driving countries out of the U.S. economic orbit serves long-term U.S. national interests. Dividing the world into two monetary blocs will limit Dollar Diplomacy to its NATO allies and satellites.
The blowback now unfolding in the wake of U.S. diplomacy begins with its anti-Russia policy. Imposing trade and monetary sanctions was expected to block Russian consumers and businesses from buying the US/NATO imports to which they had become accustomed. Confiscating Russia’s foreign currency reserves was supposed to crash the ruble, “turning it into rubble,” as President Biden promised. Imposing sanctions against importing Russian oil and gas to Europe was supposed to deprive Russia of export earnings, causing the ruble to collapse and raising import prices (and hence, living costs) for the Russian public. Instead, blocking Russian exports has created a worldwide price inflation for oil and gas, sharply increasing Russian export earnings. It exported less gas but earned more – and with dollars and euros blocked, Russia demanded payment for its exports in rubles. Its exchange rate soared instead of collapsing, enabling Russia to reduce its interest rates.
Goading Russia to send its soldiers to eastern Ukraine to defend Russian speakers under attack in Luhansk and Donetsk, along with the expected impact of the ensuing Western sanctions, was supposed to make Russian voters press for regime change. But as almost always happens when a country or ethnicity is attacked, Russians were appalled at the Ukrainian hatred of Russian-language speakers and Russian culture, and at the Russophobia of the West. The effect of Western countries banning music by Russian composers and Russian novels from libraries – capped by England banning Russian tennis players from the Wimbledon tournament – was to make Russians feel under attack simply for being Russian. They rallied around President Putin.
NATO’s trade sanctions have catalyzed helped Russian agriculture and industry to become more self-sufficient by obliging Russia to invest in import substitution. One well-publicized farming success was to develop its own cheese production to replace that of Lithuania and other European suppliers. Its automotive and other industrial production is being forced to shift away from German and other European brands to its own and Chinese producers. The result is a loss of markets for Western exporters.
In the field of financial services, NATO’s exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT bank-clearing system failed to create the anticipated payments chaos. The threat had been so loudly for so long that Russia and China had plenty of time to develop their own payments system. This provided them with one of the preconditions for their plans to split their economies away from those of the US/NATO West.
As matters have turned out, the trade and monetary sanctions against Russia are imposing the heaviest costs on Western Europe, and are likely to spread to the Global South, driving them to think about whether their economic interests lie in joining U.S. confrontational Dollar Diplomacy.The disruption is being felt most seriously in Germany, causing many companies to close down as a result of gas and other raw-materials shortages. Germany’s refusal to authorize the North Stream 2 pipeline has pushed its energy crisis to a head. This has raised the question of how long Germany’s political parties can remain subordinate to NATO’s Cold War policies at the cost of German industry and households facing sharp rises in heating and electricity costs.
The longer it takes to restore trade with Russia, the more European economies will suffer, along with the citizenry at large, and the further the euro’s exchange rate will fall, spurring inflation throughout its member countries. European NATO countries are losing not only their export markets but their investment opportunities to gain from the much more rapid growth of Eurasian countries whose government planning and resistance to financialization has proved much more productive than the US/NATO neoliberal model.
It is difficult to see how any diplomatic strategy can do more than play for time. That involves living in the short run, not the long run. Time seems to be on the side of Russia, China and the trade and investment alliances that they are negotiating to replace the neoliberal Western economic order.
America’s Ultimate Problem Is Its Neoliberal Post-Industrial Economy
The failure and blowbacks of U.S. diplomacy are the result of problems that go beyond diplomacy itself. The underlying problem is the West’s commitment to neoliberalism, financialization and privatization. Instead of government subsidy of basic living costs needed by labor, all social life is being made part of “the market” – a uniquely Thatcherite deregulated “Chicago Boys” market in which industry, agriculture, housing and financing are deregulated and increasingly predatory, while heavily subsidizing the valuation of financial and rent-seeking assets – mainly the wealth of the richest One Percent. Income is obtained increasingly by financial and monopoly rent-seeking, and fortunes are made by debt-leveraged “capital” gains for stocks, bonds and real estate.
U.S. industrial companies have aimed more at “creating wealth” by increasing the price of their stocks by using over 90 percent of their profits for stock buybacks and dividend payouts instead of investing in new production facilities and hiring more labor. The result of slower capital investment is to dismantle and financially cannibalize corporate industry in order to produce financial gains. And to the extent that companies do employ labor and set up new production, it is done abroad where labor is cheaper.
Most Asian labor can afford to work for lower wages because it has much lower housing costs and does not have to pay education debt. Health care is a public right, not a financialized market transaction, and pensions are not paid for in advance by wage-earners and employers but are public. The aim in China in particular is to prevent the rentierFinance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector from becoming a burdensome overhead whose economic interests differ from those of a socialist government.
China treats money and banking as a public utility, to be created, spent and lent for purposes that help increase productivity and living standards (and increasingly to preserve the environment). It rejects the U.S.-sponsored neoliberal model imposed by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization.
The global economic fracturing goes far beyond NATO’s conflict with Russia in Ukraine. By the time the Biden administration took office at the start of 2021, Russia and China already had been discussing the need to de-dollarize their foreign trade and investment, using their own currencies.[4]That involves the quantum leap of organizing a new payments-clearing institution. Planning had not progressed beyond broad outlines of how such a system would work, but the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s foreign reserves made such planning urgent, starting with a BRICS-plus bank. A Eurasian alternative to the IMF will remove its ability to impose neoliberal austerity “conditionalities” to force countries to lower payments to labor and give priority to paying their foreign creditors above feeding themselves and developing their own economies. Instead of new international credit being extended mainly to pay dollar debts, it will be part of a process of new mutual investment in basic infrastructure designed to accelerate economic growth and living standards. Other institutions are being designed as China, Russia, Iran, India and their prospective allies represent a large enough critical mass to “go it alone,” based on their own mineral wealth and manufacturing power.
The basic U.S. policy has been to threaten to destabilize countries and perhaps bomb them until they agree to adopt neoliberal policies and privatize their public domain. But taking on Russia, China and Iran is a much higher order of magnitude. NATO has disarmed itself of the ability to wage conventional warfare by handing over its supply of weaponry – admittedly largely outdated – to be devoured in Ukraine. In any case, no democracy in today’s world can impose a military draft to wage a conventional land warfare against a significant/major adversary. The protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s ended the U.S. military draft, and the only way to really conquer a country is to occupy it in land warfare. This logic also implies that Russia is no more in a position to invade Western Europe than NATO countries are to send conscripts to fight Russia.
That leaves Western democracies with the ability to fight only one kind of war: atomic war – or at least, bombing at a distance, as was done in Afghanistan and the Near East, without requiring Western manpower. This is not diplomacy at all. It is merely acting the role of wrecker. But that is the only tactic that remains available to the United States and NATO Europe. It is strikingly like the dynamic of Greek tragedy, where power leads to hubris that is injurious to others and therefore ultimately anti-social – and self-destructive in the end.
How then can the United States maintain its world dominance? It has deindustrialized and run up foreign official debt far beyond any foreseeable way to be paid. Meanwhile, its banks and bondholders are demanding that the Global South and other countries pay foreign dollar bondholders in the face of their own trade crisis resulting from the soaring energy and food prices caused by America’s anti-Russian and anti-China belligerence. This double standard is a basic internal contradiction that goes to the core of today’s neoliberal Western worldview.
I have described the possible scenarios to resolve this conflict in my recent book The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism. It has now also been issued in e-book form by Counterpunch Books.
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[1]“Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with RT television, Sputnik agency and Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, Moscow, July 20, 2022,” Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, July 20, 2022. https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1822901/. From Johnson’s Russia List, July 21, 2022, #5.
[2]International Maritime Organization, “Maritime Security and Safety in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov,” https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/MaritimeSecurityandSafetyintheBlackSeaandSeaofAzov.aspx. See Yves Smith, Some Implications of the UN’s Ukraine Grain and Russia Fertilizer/Food Agreements,” Naked Capitalism, July 25, 2022, and Lavrov’s July 24 speech to the Arab League.
[3]My Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire(3rded., 2021) describes how the Treasury-bill standard has provided America with a free ride and enabled it to run balance-of-payments deficits without constraint, including the costs of its overseas military spending.
[4]Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson (2021), “Beyond Dollar Creditocracy: A Geopolitical Economy,” Valdai Club Paper No. 116. Moscow: Valdai Club, 7 July, reprinted inReal World Economic Review(97), https://rwer.wordpress.com/2021/09/23.
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Thank you Yves and Professor Hudson!!
Once again, not a word wasted. The opening paragraph is a concise articulation of both the problem and the solution, and gives me hope.
This line is a nod to what #MMT architects, adherents have been pointing out for years:
“America’s international diplomacy aims to dictate financial, trade and military policies that will lock other countries into dollar debt and trade dependency by preventing them from developing alternatives.”
… that balance of payments crises all over the global south have had nothing to do with domestic debt, but rather it is foreign debt that which has been the root cause. However, critics of MMT have correctly pointed out that monetary sovereignty alone can’t pull non G7 nations along the path to fuller development from a resource acquisition perspective. I remain somewhat confident that a new transnational currency will eventually be created as a counter to dollar hegemony. It’s the only way forward to unite the global south into a closed economic system strong enough to resist western finance.
Okay, okay, I’ll buy the book!
Done.
I wish Mr. Hudson would identify the internal divisions in US foreign policy that us mere plebs are forbidden to participate in. The Davos man still thinks China can be part of the club vs the military industrialist who needs the “flag to follow the dollar and the soldiers to follow the flag”. A friend does at times ask another friend to wear the gorilla suit.
I too sometimes wish that commentator like Hudson could be more explicit and go abit further- esp as to what is happening internally in US. For a number of years Hudson has said US needs ‘a revolution’; recently I heard him say there is no prospect for such a revolution. Some characterise Dems & GOP a two sides of ‘the war party’. One meatphor is that the internal struggle in US is between ‘Cowboys and Yankees’: the industrial interests in US that are mostly internal and based in the west and south, oil, tech, (MAGA) etc and ‘established money’ of the north east based around Wall Street with cosmopolitan world view (‘hegemonic globalists’). (These are just very broad conceptual catagories, not precise delineations). Safe to assume that those with real insight intuit that the American Century is over, and better to try and play as strong a hand as possible in a new world order. Tom Luongo – for all his rhetorical hyperbole – identifies the Fed, acting for its shareholders’ (Wall Street banks) interest, is going solo (unlike 2008) and trying to salvage the dollar and the role of Wall Street from the North-Atlanticist-euro-globalists, who would see all currencies disolved in a Western dominated world digital currency managed somewhere between NY, London, Brussels….
Hudson has streamlined this argument extremely well, especially the opening paragraphs where he discusses the economic institutional aims underlying liberal internationalism and its intolerance of resistance to full bore penetration of national economies by international finance. They can give you some traction — some — in trying to talk about the context of the Ukraine war. Ymwv.
I agree this is really a good synthesis of Hudson’s insight. It is very accessible, one thought to the next. So welcome one and all to our Big Fat Greek Tragedy. The smoke and mirrors of neoliberalism. It was Gore Vidal, of course, who once said (or wrote?) that “The Wizard of Oz” was the greatest book America ever produced. Until now. “The Destiny of Civilization” will definitely take its place.
As executive and regulatory function, government is analogous to a national central nervous system, while money and banking amount to blood and the circulation system.
While civilization has come to realize government is a public utility, it’s yet to understand the same about banking.
Which has given banking the upper hand, since they are not as subject to oversight, as well as the political cycles of elections.
The situation now is a point of extreme overreach. They are having their “Let them eat cake” moment.
The problem is that government is the decision making function, so having hollowed it out and left a bunch of grifters, sociopaths and prostitutes in charge, the dynamic is left with all the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a Petri dish.
The next stage will be to turn inward and further cannibalize their own base, as well as more fighting among themselves. As will be evident after the election.
John:
That was well-done. I do agree that the “turning inward” will occur, but it’s not the election that will precipitate it. It’s the denial of Asia and possibly Africa as rent-seeking theaters. That is what Russia and China are cutting off access to, and hence the turbulence. Once this next China act has concluded, and a minor flail to extract from central and south america is attempted, then the turning inward will commence in earnest.
And this is why I am so focused on the household. The household may well become the last refuge of our freedom, and maybe better stated as “volition”. The last keep.
When you said “finance is the bloodstream”, I would like to contest that notion. Real goods are the bloodstream – the real economy is the bloodstream. Materials, ag, manufacturing, energy, transport and distribution. That’s the bloodstream.
Capital has captured the real economy. That’s what “financialization” is. Finance is the means by which the real economy is consolidated and the rent-extraction taps are set on behalf of the predators.
What if the real economy functioned without usurpation from the financial manipulators?
What if the real economy was operated by and for householders, and the use of debt and other means of financial control was systematically wrung out of the real economy?
These notions need some thought, IMHO. I currently believe it can be done.
Thanks Tom
Real goods are the bloodstream. Finance may in a sense be a part of the bloodstream, perhaps the platelets. They can easily take over and become a leukemia, destroying the movement of the whole blood, the real goods.
Perhaps this comment will be taken as a touch rude – which I sincerely don’t intend, but rather to hone in on a more precise metaphor already utilized by the author.
In the book “Killing the Host,” Hudson compares the takeover of the FIRE sector, the dominance of rentier interests, and the intellectual logic of “junk economics” (a separate book) as a parasite. I just love this metaphor for its explanatory power. Parasitic rentierism first euthanizes the host organism (productive economy) and convince the vital systems that the parasite is, in fact, the host organism. So the systems feed the parasite rather than itself, weakening and emaciating the host. Assuming the parasite cannot stop engorging itself, this really only leads to a singular conclusion for both entities – an ugly, deformed, purely irrational, but inevitable death. Unless, somehow the parasite is purged or extracted from the host, which is nourished to recovery.
I have never formally studied economics, but Hudson has revealed the political economic workings of our present neoliberal system in tremendously helpful ways for me. I feel I have a grasp which can help inform my friends, family and hotel coworkers and fellow union members. I feel I can go to the public comment at my San Antonio city council and reveal publicly their duplicitous aims. I can organize as a sentient being which is startling to most. The truth of the world around us is grasp-able for most all of us – we are just not supposed to encounter it.
Anyway, all this to say I, uh, if you can’t tell… Recommend engaging with all that Professor Hudson publishes. It’s kinda weird, but it’s been invaluable for my quality of life and mental health
im late, of course, but:
1. remember that “economy”=”The word economy in English is derived from the Middle French’s yconomie, which itself derived from the Medieval Latin’s oeconomia. The Latin word has its origin at the Ancient Greek’s oikonomia or oikonomos. The word’s first part oikos means “house”, and the second part nemein means “to manage”.[2]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy#Etymology
and 2. since wife passed and ive been necessarily thrust into places like the inside of banks and other ridiculous places i would otherwise avoid….when the jawing ensues after bidness is done(a feature of this place)…with bank prez, or funeral home guy or the HR folks at school, and on and on….i use “violent parasitical elite” in a sentence, as a shibboleth, to gauge what’s in their mind.
bank prez, notably and obviously, picked up on the usage of that phrase.
gave measured and carefully worded tacit agreement…as if he had thought about it, and/or must field such stuff more often than i had assumed.(i’ve known him for 30 years)
I hereby nominate Professor Michael Hudson for the real Nobel Prize, for world peace. He makes clear the path to that goal.
Tbh NCrs should just create a Peace Award.
It’ll be a trophy in the shape of a hawk.
Yves could write the Epitaph ✍️
Gonna read Graebers Dawn and then get Destiny.
Or maybe in the shape of a dead eagle, the olive branch in its ass and the arrows in the carcass.
“E pluribus, anum”
Amen, brother Hudson. “Wrecker” it is. As George Santayana said: “Americans are a primitive people disguised by the latest inventions.”
I think it’s Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland that highlights the trend toward simply encouraging dissent…of any kind. Thomas Frank wrote “The Wrecking Crew” about this movement in Kansas. The billionaire funders of the dissent have absolutely no qualm about generously funding anyone with a gripe.
Very clear and wide ranging. Your comment on the easy of USA ‘printing’ dollars and the benefits to USA reminds me of Jacques Rueff, De Gaulle’s advisor’s comment. Has there even been an independent audit of USA gold holdings in recent years – could they have stolen Venezuela’s gold to boost their own. Could Russia tell its creditors to take their repayments from their money taken by USA as Russia does have have money?
Hudson’s whole approach embodies two monumental fallacies:
(1) He speaks only in terms of abstract reified pseudo-entities (ie., nation-states called Russia, China, USA, et. al.) but never in terms of the specific ruling classes of those regimes, their externally and internally conflicted interests, the internal contradictions of those class-regimes driving their mutually conflicting international politics.
(2) Much worse, he bases his whole analysis on a supposed distinction between “financial” and “industrial” capital, with the former bad and the latter, especially as practised by the Chinese nomenklatura, very good indeed. The most profound, very dangerous, fallacy is that the operative agent in the present ecocidal planetary crisis, the combination of “greenhouse gasses” in the upper atmosphere with rampant worldwide pollution of land, soil, air, and water, is entirely the result of INDUSTRIAL capitalism, with virtually no contribution from financial activities. Rejecting the very essence of Marxian analysis, Hudson is blind to the fact that all property incomes, especially those derived from financial “wealth,” (profit of enterprise, interest, rent, executive salaries and perks) are exclusively formed from surplus-value produced by productive laborers employed by INDUSTRIAL/AGRICULTURAL capital. His entire effort is to glorify the productivist outlook of the Chinese nomenklatura while it pursues the wholesale primitive accumulation of capital (proletarianization of a peasant population) in Sinkiang and the purchase of agricultural land throughout what it likes to call “the global South.”
ps. This may, in comparison, be a minor quibble. but when Hudson writes “a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid” he is mindlessly repeating another false universal cliché. Can anyone name a single Greek tragedy of which this is true? (Oedipos? The attempt to “avoid fate” occurs long before the drama even begins!)
I suggest that financial capitalism is no less harmful to the Earth than the old style, probably worse. There seems to be no less accumulation of junk and CO2 is spewing forth like never before (well, OK, in geologic history there were worse events than us but that does not say much). Financialization has led to more outsourcing where pollution is less regulated and out of sight while furthering the concentration of power and it’s ability to prevent governments from doing their jobs.
So how do we create a system where “production” (C-P-C vs. C-C) is healing to the earth? Could we transition back to a neolithic future? If we want to maintain complex, comfy modern lives how do we get eco-socialism instead of eco-fascism? I fear if we don’t we don’t get one or the other we will get eco-totalitarianism where the totalitarian is a grievously injured and really pissed off Mother Earth.
Um, he killed his father, slept with mom and had very, very bad eyesight. Seems he didn’t escape his ‘fate’.
And ‘Casablanca’ wasn’t a true story, but the Nazis were bastards and had to be fought, Vichy were collaborators, and Isolationism was and is never a good or practical policy.
“and isolationism was and is never a good . . . policy”? If that comment was not satire, note that but for the United States’ intervention in WW 1, the warring parties would most likely have come to a stand still, and Versailles and WW 2 in the European theater, as well as the Holocaust and Russian Revolution and its resultant blood bath, would never have occurred.
Odd that I write on vacation while sitting in a cafe two blocks from where Princip killed the Archduke.
The US wasn’t isolationist prior 1917, since they just spent the last 15 years absorbing the Caribbean, Philippines and the Pacific with our new shiny Navy. (That Navy, under Teddy Roos steamed around the world to swing it, and it hasn’t stopped since.)
Why Wilson maneuvered the US into WW1 was not anti-isolationism but because he was was a scumbag business tool who would fit right in with our ‘leader’s’ today.
The Russians had a mini revolution in 1905 because their govt was oppressive elitist a holes who didn’t give a s…. about their people.
Lastly, hope you enjoy your latte in the former Versailles created Yugo. However, the Assasination was only the spark, the previous 20 year military build up and insane interlocking treaties ‘forced’ the beligerants to do what they were itching to do anyway.
Send other people to die while they lather about supposed aggression.
Think Mr Hudson has nailed it perfectly.
Being familiar with Michael Hudson and agreeing with his conclusions, I have no idea if “DeDollarization” is discussed in his new book. The article below seems to bolster his point of view. Shy of Lula da Silva being “terminated with extreme prejudice,” this strikes me as some badly needed good news. https://www.silkroadbriefig.com/news/2022/05/05/brazils-da-silva-proposes-a-latin-american-currency-to-be-free-of-the-us-dollar/
Correct link: https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2022/05/05/brazils-da-silva-proposes-a-latin-american-currency-to-be-free-of-the-us-dollar/. There is a missing ‘n’ in the link.
I’ve got no truck with Uncle Karl, I think he was a top notch analyst of his time, economics and geopolitics. But he was susceptible to the great failing of his time: the axiomatic myths of the Enlightenment about human rationality. Just like capitalism, Marxism really requires perfectly rational people. Even supra-rational in that (in Freudian terms) it requires people to live by the superego rather than the ego of liberal capitalism. It’s not realistic because people aren’t rational animals; they are animals capable of reason. So we end up always with a vanguard of the revolution which becomes a class that ends up with a fair number of the characteristics that Marxism is set against.
Another way may be possible. We’ve never seen a socialist, much less Marxist society that wasn’t attacked by capitalists. But I wouldn’t hold my breath because we run into the rationality issue anyhow. So the only thing left to do is find a way to operate politics and economics in ways that primarily benefit the majority of a nation’s populace. Have the Chinese managed this? I can’t say, but it looks like they’ve done a better job than any “western” nation.
Don’t we have a better chance of addressing societal and environmental issues when governments are in charge of how capital is used? Look at electric car adoption in China vs anywhere else. Is that not because the Chinese state prioritized it and invested in it? Yes, they burn too much coal, but soon their climate emissions will drop dramatically as they’ll switch to Russian gas and they’re already a massive developer of renewable energy.
The world has an oligarch problem, but oligarchs are a feature of the neoliberal world order. It’s what Clinton was counting on by “opening up” China. It’s the tool used to pillage Russia, and Putin has spoken with significant force on the issue of Russia oligarchs. A world without rich people would be cool, but it’s unrealistic. We live in a world dominated by uber rich people who are loyal only to their money and their class (capitalist). Any world where the rich people either felt or are forced to use their money to benefit the state (and its people) is a significant improvement. I’m willing to settle for it. But I’m also not a Marxist so there’s that.
Lex and Bruno, those are excellent expositions that help us focus better on where our problems actually are.
We are animals, some of whom can momentarily think rationally. We’re a herd of wackos, a few of whom got technically inspired enough to (borrowing from Adam’s post above) become a “primitive people disguised by the latest inventions.”
Bruno said, and I’m paraphrasing, that “the real economy trashes the planet, otherwise it’s OK”. He’s right. Many of you have heard me say “our economy’s design is nearly obsolete”. That’s what I mean: they way our economy currently works is the real tragedy; the politics is sort of a side-show. IMHO, of course. It most certainly does _not_ have to be this stupid.
The technology we use to draw upon the natural world, to deliver what the household needs in order to function…is obsolete. And many of us know it. “Technology” in this sense is “what humans know how to do”, and to focus enmity where it belongs, “and what the oligarchs permit us to use”.
The beef against the oligarchs is that they’ve accumulated all the wealth, and have the power to upgrade the tech, and they don’t. Instead they fritter away the world’s wealth in stupid self-aggrandizing conspicuous consumption while bickering over what as-yet un-extracted wealth remains.
Lex says “we’re gonna have oligarchs”. Capacity is not uniformly distributed among humans, so he’s right. It’s a fact of life.
And Lex would love to see some force capable of compelling the oligarchs to grow up. (That’s what it is: emotional maturation). If we have to wait for the growing up, we’re screwed. It’s moving, but way too slowly. If anyone had any doubts about it after the Act I: Russia, then Act II: China will surely put it to bed.
I think we have a better chance of survival if we choose from among the billions of non-oligarchs, who chance has compelled – by deprivation, by striving, by art – has compelled to grow up. There are possibly millions of such people.
But they do not behave coherently enough as to become a countervailing, or maybe more constructively – a leading force in the cultural realm.
I think we have a communication and coordinating problem. The emotionally-evolved capables – that’s us and NC-alikes world-wide – we’re not yet good enough at achieving functional coherence to re-direct the ship. That’s where I think we should focus.
Karl Marx is fine, wonderful, (insert any applicable hyperbolic praise here) as far as he was able to go. But people, he was a contemporary of Charles Dickens! Yes, great insights, but not necessarily (or, ‘at all’) a prognosticator, and things are very different now.. We should take what he saw and did, which was immense, in its time, and carry it forward to today, which is where we live, and I daresay, suffer. The point of giants is to actually stand on their shoulders.
“[Marx] was susceptible to the great failing of his time: the axiomatic myths of the Enlightenment about human rationality.”
I believe Marx felt that such “rationality” might arise from the sufferings and exploitation of those at the sharp end of the capitalist “labour contract.” If such learning is an “Enlightenment Myth” then we are stuffed. It is irrationalism all the way down (may that not be the “Counter-Enlightenment Myth”?)
To start with, I will admit to being rather confused by much of what was written, particularly with regard to the the second “fallacy”. And I don’t get the sense that there will be satisfaction coming from any response, so maybe I aim this reply to others who encounter this “criticism”
I cannot tell if the idea of “Hudson’s entire approach” is in good faith. To make such a statement at least partially implies having encountered “Hudson’s entire approach”, meaning at least such a significant portion of over a half century for which one could make such a claim. I have no idea why someone would engage in such an activity with a thinker they have such a problem with outside of academia. Thus, perhaps in error, I assume you are largely basing your assumptions about the approach on this singular article. I think (hope) this recent article from Hudson (also posted on this site) satisfies at least partially the claim that there isn’t enough specifics regarding ruling class interests.
https://michael-hudson.com/2022/02/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/
Regarding the the second fallacy, I am even more convinced that there has been little engagement with his prior work. The turn to finance capitalism has set in motion a reversion to the rentierism from which capitalism was supposed to free itself from – “markets free FROM rent” vs “markets free FOR rent”. I may disagree, but I have no bone to pick with criticism regarding the route of Chinese industrial development. I just think it is important to bear in mind that this development was achieved, first almost exclusively, and diminishing from that point, along the terms of western capitalist firms. As they have achieved development and poverty alleviation goals, they have set their sites, ostensibly, upon more ecologically sustainable goals. All of these hierarchies of priorities would seem to mesh with Mao’s concept of primary and secondary contradictions.
And finally, the largest fallacy in this commentary/critique is the role of imperialism and acting as if the financialization of the west wasn’t predicated on the extraction and production of the global south. Along with the economic and military might and sociopathology by which it achieves its aims. This is yet another subject which Hudson had written extensively, and, imo, enlighteningly about for a half century.
I will concede I have read little from Hudson which focuses exclusively on the ecological crises. However, I feel it is relatively fair for him to 1) nod to the democratic potential of liberation from our neo-feudal ruling class 2) suggest a move to a cooperative rather than competitive geopolitical orientation and 3) let the people’s desire for survival and expertise of the competent figure that part out.
Ya mean like how all those giant data centers and financial districts full of shiny office towers housing the FIRE sector are totally green and zero emission? ;)
there is no confusion about this period.
the people who came to power in 1993 are not imperialists, imperialism through out history there has always been some give and take, many losers, but not always blowouts of other countries.
the people who came to power in 1993 are not imperialists, they are fascists. under fascism whats mine is mine, whats yours is mine, and there will be no discussions period.
they are the hammer, everything else is a nail. when you understand this, then you can see why there was NAFTA and letting china into the W.T.O..
and above all, white supremacy. that is why they thought it was safe to let china in, but they are to stupid to understand what they did, it ended their reign of terror.
china and russia are not sub human as the free traders thought they were.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-bill-clinton-legacy_b_106089
“Free trade, democracy promotion, and the use of force to uphold global norms comprised the core of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy – and they remain the central ideas of today’s Democratic foreign policy establishment.”
when bill clinton signed nafta, destroyed GATT and replaced it with the W.T.O., then let china in, was the equivalent of hitlers operation Barbarossa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa
hitler never attempted peace with the soviet union when it became apparent he would lose, because he viewed them as sub humans, and what was theirs, was really his. once you understand this, then you can understand what appears to be irrational.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_System_%28economic_plan%29
“Henry Clay’s “American System,” devised in the burst of nationalism that followed the War of 1812, remains one of the most historically significant examples of a government-sponsored program to harmonize and balance the nation’s agriculture, commerce, and industry.
This “System” consisted of three mutually reenforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other “internal improvements” to develop profitable markets for agriculture.
Funds for these subsidies would be obtained from tariffs and sales of public lands. Clay argued that a vigorously maintained system of sectional economic interdependence would eliminate the chance of renewed subservience to the free-trade, laissez-faire “British System.”
— United States Senate website[1]”
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-the-tariff/
“Protective tariffs did not unfairly burden ‘the poor farmer,’ Lancaster argued, because all ‘manufactured articles were sold as low and many lower after [the enactment of the 1842 tariff] than they were before.’ Prices stayed down because manufacturers ‘were encouraged to start their factories believing they could find a sale for their goods,’ and the increased number of firms heightened competition, thus preventing ‘any extortion in prices.’ Lancaster insisted that ‘These facts prove that our revenue is paid entirely by the foreign manufacturers; except perhaps occasionally some of our Fops and Dandies may be inclined to show off with a London Coat, a Paris pair of boots, or ornament his table with a set of English knives and forks, or his parlour with an European carpet.’ “
Neoliberalism is a metastasized form of libertarianism, a philosophy which is neither “conservative” nor “democratic.” Libertarianism exists merely to justify unfettered personal greed and freedom from humanistic morality.
In that self-regarding Southern California punk Grover Norquist’s summation, it exists to drown government in the bathtub. It is simply a recipe for dog-eat-dog anarchy, where the only law is that of the jungle.
Now the world sees this for what it is and will turn their backs on us. We shall reap the whirlwind…
I disagree with Tom Pfotzer and Bruno in as much as I think that a truly ‘real’ economy need not trash the planet; AND that the reason that it currently does trash the planet is the fault of politics.
I agree that the technologies used today are obsolete BUT the reason they are is because the oligarchs in charge have REQUIRED (not merely permitted) such use. For instance the US government prevented the release of almost 6,000 technical patents for general societal use prior to President Trump gaining office..
In other words I think that our current global dystopia is a deliberate consequence of conscious governance decisions at all levels. The panacea must be to change that societal governance paradigm. That means we must grow up as communities and consciously take responsibility for local affairs and decision making instead of thinking that voting every few years for someone else to make our decisions for us will produce good governance.
Clearly the current wisdom about so-called democratic mechanisms and centralised governance arrangements are dysfunctional and enable oligarchs to purchase control of governments via bribery, blackmail and control of the MSM and Bernaysian style politically manipulative advertising. This has been the case since inception of the Westminster pseudo-democratic governance mechanism.See eg: Democracy, Deception, Deceit – they’re all the same – https://english.pravda.ru/opinion/126430-democracy_deception_deceit/
The process has become self perpetuating because corrupt, oligarch-owned, governments have implemented oligarchic (Rockefeller and Carnegie developed and funded) Prussian originated behaviourist education systems that provide factory-style, regimented, age segregated schooling of children well into adulthood. That centralised, government controlled education system dumbs down, corrupts and infantalises children, socially conditioning them to become mind controlled, conformist robots. The result has been that huge numbers of people appear to have lost the ability to think rationally. This tendency is now also apparent at university levels.
Once the ability and willingness of children to rationally discern fact from fiction is removed, they become senseless robots marching to the messaging of their masters.
To destroy society you have to destroy its moral underpinning, its language and its family ethos. This has been done by destroying the ability of children to think rationally using such mechanisms as LGBTQ+ language inversion nonsense.
This language and education destruction process started more than a century ago when the Rockefellers and their ilk took over the US education, medical and pharmaceutical industries by financing them. Their pernicious influence and covert control has now spread to the whole world as the mass psychosis and stupidity of billions of people willingly accepting the COVID scamdemic nonsense attests. IF you believe that a man can choose to be a woman and have babies, thinking that common colds and flues justify locking down the entire planet for years, is a doddle.
Any society that condones or supports the corruption of infants and children cannot survive. Current centralised government controlled education systems captured by bahaviourist Wokeism constitute an attempt to induce communities to commit societal suicide. And the process appears to be succeeding as the increasing decline in Western nation populations attests.
To reverse the globalist initiative to control this planet and all of its inhabitants humanity needs a total rethink and revamp of attitudes to education and the meaning of life. That means fundamentally changing global politics.
To reverse the decline in proper governance societies need to stop enforcing public factory style mass education of children in age segregated cohorts f because it is the Trojan Horse inserted at the heart of our most vulnerable societal infrastructure and is designed to stupify and destroy societal rationality, morality and culture, leaving a drooling, enslaved remnant.
In future, education needs to be decentralised, localised, organised and controlled by parents operating in neighbourhood and district community groups and settings. Central governments should not be directly involved in the process and centralised government school, college and university systems should also be replaced by elected regionally organised, supervising councils. Such decentralisation of education processes will prevent the universal dissemination of corrupt ideas and practices.
The fact that the public indoctrination of infants and preschool children through to adulthood with this biological, sexual, behavioural and cultural nonsense highlights the fact that current political and governance arrangements are fundamentally defective and destructive; and need to be replaced.
For society to be healthy and vibrant governments must be operated by temporary servants of the general population and their stewardship must be properly monitored and supervised by electors.
Wherever education and other dysfunctional systems unfit for purpose exist they need to be removed and replaced with governance arrangements that are fit for purpose. Our future governance arrangements need to be genuinely representative systems consisting of grass roots republican councils in which every elected representative is subject to RECALL by those who elect them, if they fail to advocate and implement ethical laws and rational arrangements in accordance with policies they promised electors they would advocate and implement.