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. Debt service and rent would become the major overhead costs for families, industry and governments. 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. Board meetings for the new oligarchy would be held at Davos’s World Economic Forum. 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. There would be little need for politics in such a world. The evangelistic aim is to financialize and privatize economies by shifting planning away from national governments to a cosmopolitan financial sector. The United States views its economic interest to lie in seeking to spread its neoliberal ideology globally. 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 19 th and early 20 th century.Ĭlausewitz popularized the axiom that war is an extension of national interests – mainly economic. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear.
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. What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. 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.
officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out.
Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S.