<https://tinyurl.com/24zwadpo> nakedcapitalism.com

<https://tinyurl.com/29mvtv5v> michael-hudson.com

The End of Western Civilization ..

... Running the population, industry and even governments into debt to an
oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now
trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime -
U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism - on the entire world. That is
what today's New Cold War is all about ..

The United States has followed a .. trajectory of imperial overreaching at
the cost of its domestic economy .. The financial colonization of the post-
Soviet Union in the 1990s by the "shock therapy" of privatization
giveaways, followed by China's admission to the World Trade Organization in
2001 - with the expectation that China would, like Yeltsin's Russia, become
a U.S. financial colony - led America's economy to deindustrialize by
shifting employment to Asia. Trying to force submission to U.S. control by
inaugurating today's New Cold War has led Russia, China and other countries
to break away from the dollarized trade and investment system, leaving the
United States and NATO Europe to suffer austerity and deepening wealth
inequality as debt ratios are soaring ..

The United States is now attempting to live mainly off financial gains
(interest, profits on foreign investment and central bank credit creation
to inflate capital gains) instead of creating wealth through its own labor
and industry. Its Western allies seek to do the same. They euphemize this
U.S.-dominated system as "globalization," but it is simply a financial form
of colonialism - backed with the usual military threat of force and covert
"regime change" to prevent countries from withdrawing ..

This U.S. and NATO-based imperial system seeks to indebt weaker countries
and force them to turn control over their policies to the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank. Obeying the neoliberal anti-labor "advice" of
these institutions leads to a debt crisis that forces the debtor country's
foreign-exchange rate to depreciate. The IMF then "rescues" them from
insolvency on the "conditionality" that they sell off the public domain and
shift taxes off the wealthy (especially foreign investors) onto labor.

Oligarchy and debt are the defining characteristics of Western economies.
America's foreign military spending .. have left its own Treasury deeply
indebted to foreign governments and their central banks .. Rising debt
destroys economies when it is not being used to finance new capital
investment in means of production. Most Western credit today is created to
inflate stock, bond and real estate prices, not to restore industrial
ability. As a result of this debt-without-production approach, the U.S.
domestic economy has been overwhelmed by debt owed to its own financial
oligarchy ..

President Biden and his State Department neoliberals accuse China and any
other country seeking to maintain its economic independence and self-
reliance of being "autocratic." Their rhetorical sleight of hand juxtaposes
democracy to autocracy. What they call "autocracy" is a government strong
enough to prevent a Western-oriented financial oligarchy from indebting
the population to itself - and then prying away its land and other property
into its own hands and those of its American and other foreign backers.

The Orwellian Doublethink of calling oligarchies "democracies" is followed
by defining a free market as one that is free for financial rent-seeking.
U.S.-backed diplomacy has indebted countries, forcing them to sell control
of their public infrastructure and turn their economy's "commanding
heights" into opportunities to extract monopoly rent ..

Today, China, India, Iran and other Eurasian economies have taken the first
step as a precondition for a multipolar world, by rejecting America's
insistence that they join the U.S. trade and financial sanctions against
Russia. These countries realize that if the United States could destroy
Russia's economy and replace its government with U.S.-oriented Yeltsin-like
proxies, the remaining countries of Eurasia would be next in line. The only
possible way for history really to end would be for the American military
to destroy every nation seeking an alternative to neoliberal privatization
and financialization ..

NATO's proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the
world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies.
China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a
public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly
privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them
displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary
independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of
borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and
investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an
existential threat to America's control of the global economy.

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by "freeing" the wealthy
classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of
wealth .. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran,
Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately
military confrontation, is how America intends to "spread democracy" ..

By stripping away prosperity at home, this dynamic requires a constant
reaching out to extract an economic affluence .. at the expense of
colonies or debtor countries. The United States through its New Cold War is
aiming at securing precisely such economic tribute from other countries ..
At issue is more than just U.S. hegemony and its dollarized control of
international finance and money creation. Politically at issue is the idea
of "democracy" that has become a euphemism for an aggressive financial
oligarchy seeking to impose itself globally by predatory financial,
economic and political control backed by military force ..

....