American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama

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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 ...

Finance Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Nature

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS1XQBB3YsQ Transcript of Interview on The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong May 25th, 2022 DANNY HAIPHONG: Good afternoon, everyone. Happy Wednesday, May 25th, welcome to the stream, to another left lens. Today we have a very special guest so as you're coming in make sure you are liking the stream sharing it, make sure that you are subscribing to the channel and hitting that notifications bell, and as always you know please do support this work here at this channel and all the work that I do at patreon.com/dannyhaiphong. But with that said I want to introduce our guests because we have a lot to talk about over the next hour and it is economist Michael Hudson. He is the author of the new book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance capitalism, Industrial Capitalism ...

International Trade and MMT with Keen, Hudson

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Macro and Cheese pod, July 9 2022.  Michael Hudson A central tenet of the World Bank from the beginning is to convince countries not to grow their own food, but to create plantation agriculture to prevent family-owned farming of food, to grow plantation export crops and they become dependent on the United States for their grain. Steve Keen If you look at just the shipping involved in international trade, it’s something of the order of 20%, I think, of our carbon production comes out of the entire mechanics of shipping goods around the planet. And we realize we’ve massively overshot the capacity of the biosphere to support our industrial sedentary civilization. So, one way to reduce that is by reducing international trade. Geoff Ginter Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse ...

The End of Western Civilization

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Why it lacks resilience, and What will take its place Paper presented on July 11, 2022 to The Ninth South-South Forum on Sustainability. THE COLLAPSE OF MODERN CIVILIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY. The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria – love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of ...

From Junk Economics to a False View of History: Where Western Civilization Took a Wrong Turn

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A presentation to the Building bridges around David Graeber's legacy conference, Paris, Friday July 7, 2022 It may seem strange to invite an economist to give a keynote speech to a conference of the social sciences. Economists have been characterized as autistic and anti-social in the popular press for good reason. They are trained to think abstractly and use a priori deduction – based on how they think societies should develop. Today’s mainstream economists look at neoliberal privatization and free-market ideals as leading society’s income and wealth to settle at an optimum equilibrium without any need for government regulation – especially not of credit and debt. The only role acknowledged for government is to enforce the “sanctity of contracts” and “security of property.” By this they mean the enforcement of debt ...

Mid 2022 Geo-Political Levers at Play

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  Economist Michael Hudson on inflation and Fed plan to cut wages: A depression is coming Economist Michael Hudson explains the inflation crisis and US Federal Reserve’s “austerity program to reduce wages” and boost unemployment. He warns a “long depression” is coming, due to the new cold war on Russia and China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AJwMvCxwm0   Economist Michael Hudson explains the inflation crisis and the US Federal Reserve’s “austerity program to reduce wages.” Western so-called economics experts are openly calling to boost unemployment. Hudson warns a “long depression” is coming, in which the poor will suffer so the rich can get richer, in order to advance Washington’s new cold war on Russia and China. BENJAMIN NORTON: Hey, everyone, this is Ben Norton, and you are watching or listening to the Multipolarista podcast. I am always privileged to be joined by ...