For "Financists".

I put quotation marks for a reason but make no mistake--I understand the importance of money for the economy, they are the blood of economy. But here is the problem about which I am on record for many years--unlike tangibles of agriculture, machines, healthcare and education, money, finances that is, whose properties can be described in purely materialistic terms, e.g. "this lathe is 50 years old but it still does the job and does it well", or "this dump-truck sucks, and is about to break, because...", you realistically cannot do this with money. 

Whether you like it or not, but money always carry with them a huge baggage of appropriated mythical qualities which are, unlike it was the personal case with Hank Hill who shed his tear for his truck by watching movie about the "death" of a tractor, money and their effect are omnipresent in human culture and are either extolled or condemned. In the end, Judas sold Jesus out for 30 silver coins, money that is, not for the new Ford truck or X-Box whatever the latest model. Remarkably, it is in the times of serious troubles when money lose all its allure and tangibles become more precious than money. What's the point of money when life-sustaining 125 grams of bread in Leningrad in 1942 could be received only by presenting the coupon (card--kartochka) and you couldn't buy it even if you wanted to no matter amount of money. What is the worth of money when your life depends on tourniquet and a vile of penicillin but you need it now to survive and no amount of money can buy you both, rather inexpensive items. 

You may say my examples are not precise, sure--I do not pretend to cover all bases. But for years I continue to drive this point home: money are just the medium of exchange and as such they are a derivative, however important, because they either have foundation of tangibles or they don't. Bretton Woods and US Dollar emerged primarily due to a fact that the United States in 1944 was the only country among world powers which not only hasn't been devastated by the War, but, in fact, benefited greatly from the war and in 1945 US economy was responsible for 50% of world's manufacturing in goods. Simple as that, anyone who tells you otherwise--they better get back to school and take a basic truthful course of the history of the 20th century. But now we live in the 21st. 

The US dollar is dealing with some of the same challenges that the British pound faced in the early 1900s, before it went into decline, Goldman Sachs said in a research note released on Thursday. The Wall Street bank warns that the greenback could lose its global dominance. According to the research seen by Business Insider, the move by Washington and its allies to freeze much of the Russian Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves has raised concerns that countries could start moving away from the dollar. Analysts explained the risk as due to worries about the power the dollar grants the US. The challenges that Goldman Sachs named include the fact that the US has a relatively small share of global trade compared to the dominance of its currency in global payments. Another issue is that the country has a deteriorating “net foreign asset position,” with rising foreign debts. In addition, the nation faces geopolitical problems, such as the conflict in Ukraine. The Goldman Sachs economists also said the nation’s large debts due to the fact that it is a big importer of goods could be a particular problem.

No shit, geniuses. How about you learn for warm-up what is the national power and how it is formed, before throwing our way all these contrived financial psychobabble and translate it into normal human language for the average Joe on the street, that the US economy is dwarfed by China's, that India, for all her problems is ticking up economically and will overtake the US fairly soon, that Russian economy is larger than that of Germany possibly two to three times, that the only thing which matters in the world is how large your economy is and what you produce and how you can defend your resources and sovereignty. And it goes without saying that the United States and its currency begin to fail across the board on pretty much any criteria. 

And then there is a power element to all this: Russia's massive resources are defended by one of the best armed forces in the world and massive arsenal of both nuclear and conventional high precision stand-off weapons. The United States cannot realistically fight conventionally Russia without sustaining catastrophic loses and immediately escalating to the nuclear threshold. Hence a hysteria about Ukraine and a complete butt-hurt propaganda about Russia "losing" in 404. This is not about caring about Ukraine, it is in full understanding that the US-established zero-sum game militarily with Russia is an excellent demonstration of how US proxies have their asses kicked starting from Georgia in 2008, to Syria and now, the last best hope of neocons, in Ukraine. Against the background of the US having zero prospects in Syria, having been pushed from Iraq and being utterly humiliated militarily in Afghanistan--the US doesn't seem that mighty and invincible, in fact the opposite is true and the world took note. 

The only chance for the US to fight China is on Indian Ocean's SLOCs, where the US Navy still holds the edge, primarily because of its submarine force, but China is building up and will eventually both mitigate her dependence on SLOCs and develop a serious naval deterrent. I don't want to even go into the discussion of the US pretending that it can fight PLA on the continent--this is not even funny. So, there you are. Now Borisov made an announcement that new State Order for Defense (GOZ) will include further robotization and deployment of direct energy weapons (in Russian). Always keep in mind this military aspect--it is what shapes geopolitics.  

Russia de facto introduced the gas Ruble, oil Ruble is coming because both Gazprom and Rosneft exited their EU subsidiaries and now have nothing to do with them--let Germany "nationalize" them (I guess one can always use additional office furniture and empty storage facilities) and now EU doesn't have contracts for gas and oil, since, before the latest events, contracts were signed with... and you have guessed it, EU subsidiaries of Gazprom and Rosneft which now haму no relation to either Gazprom or Rosneft. Good luck, EU, negotiating new contracts with Gazprom and Rosneft. I heard Gazprom Bank is a very good bank, and, most importantly, it is in Russia which precludes the repeat of West's standard procedure of robbing others, such as was freezing Russia's currency assets worth in excess of $300 billion. I know, for German "elites" who still view Russians as subhumans (old habits are difficult to get rid of) this whole thing is so humiliating but Europe made her choices. No contracts, no resources. What is the Euro worth now? And this is just the start. 

Now, we can go back to what I mentioned yesterday about Hungary and Slovakia becoming this proverbial window from EU in order to somehow satisfy its needs. Well, I am 100% sure both Hungary and Slovakia will be only happy to oblige because they have no problems with doing what is profitable for their countries and do not give a shit about ideology. This also explains the fact that Russians are in no hurry to return about 500 Boeing and Airbus planes leased by Russia's air lines and Russians are really stunned by sheer idiocy of the West which thinks that it can steal more than 300 billion USD from Russia and Russia will not retaliate. Those 500 commercial aircraft cover a large portion of $300 billion stolen from Russia and Russians will have no problem servicing them, because Russia has her own massive aerospace and adjacent to it industries capable to manufacture any spare parts. So, you see--physical economy is a very different game than currency speculation and stock trading, and even banking. It is what you have at hand which matters, not what you project. In the times of troubles this is absolutely true.

In related news, Russia continues to lose tremendously in 404, to such a degree that what's left of Marines 503 battalion of VSU (264 people) decided not to risk it anymore:

And surrendered. Good for them, LDNR will need all manpower it can get to restore Donbass cities and towns. Very many VSU POWs are already working clearing streets and rebuilding on the liberated territories. I mean those who were just grunts, Nazis have a very different fate for them. And this is the primer for Monday.

Necessary Evil?

You know all my attitude in general towards Western "economic science", which, bar few exceptions here and there, is nothing more than a variety of iterations on monetary theory and, in general, is not economic, per se, but financial only at its very core. As an example--many those "economists" with degrees in "economics" from a variety of Western economics programs are primarily (not all) people who deal in stocks, currency speculations, cooking of books, fraudulent valuations--it is them who introduced risible $23 trillion US GDP to us--many of them are downright bankers who know debit and credit and bank operations but who do not operate and cannot operate (due to lack of background) in a much larger framework of real economy, real politics, geopolitics, power balance etc. Those skills require a completely different intellectual and (true) scientific training. In the end, recall Michael Hudson's recent succinct statement:

The gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector. And probably they didn’t have debt in it either.

I happen to agree and may even add, that courses on physics, engineering, industrial design, real trade, foreign relations, organization of logistics, modern transportation, maritime security, military power also do not appear in economic textbooks. So, why have I brought this up, again. 

It is a truism now that Western "intelligence" on Russia, quoting Patrick Armstrong, is "very bad", and this is putting it mildly. It is easy to explain--imagine some Western "educated" (quotation marks are deliberate) journo or "economist", people who understand only Wall Street "economic" realities and subscribe to Western "interpretation" of human rights, getting into Russia. They are immediately presented with the set of economic and human patterns they not only never encountered in their lives but never heard of them. Most of those people, in their attempt to get a grasp of that find those who are "culturally" close to them in Russia and this is precisely a narrow strata of fringe Russia's liberals (aka liberda) who use same lingo and value same things as those Western journos, economists etc. use and value. Bingo, it seems that the issue is solved. Well ...no. In fact, this modus operandi is precisely the reason behind Western "analysts" of Russia being a laughing stock and being incapable to find their own ass with their both hands in the brightly lit room, forget about making any sensible predictions (or forecasts) on Russia. They simply have no instrumentation for that. Enter RT's today's piece by Ben Aris. 

I totally get it, that RT has to present a variety of opinions on Russia, including some which may not be positive at all, and we know that Russia is affected adversely both by Covid-19 and Oil Wars, but what Ben Aris of IntelliNews (formerly of Daily Telegraph) writes is a good insight into the minds and operational mechanisms of all kinds of similar fraudster publications pretending to provide "value" for "investors" (I know, it is such a funny term), Ben Aris "covered" Russia since 1993, and the term "covered" should be used cautiously here because British media are leading propaganda outlets in the West when providing a murky stream of BS. So, Ben Aris is no different and he opens with a broadside:

When the pandemic struck, Mishustin was still in the middle of reforming his team, and focused on a technical task: implementing the 12 national projects, not dealing with an economic meltdown. Ministers who performed badly when it came to implementing their policy goals have been sacked, and a new crop of bureaucrats was installed to take over. Mishustin drew heavily on his former colleagues from the tax service, which he ran to great effect for a decade. However, these people do not necessarily make the best HR choices when it comes to crisis management. Their skill has been to fine-tune the machinery of government to make it work more efficiently. The policies now needed are about squeezing an extra 5 percent of revenues out of VAT payments, not shock actions to put a floor under the collapse and reverse the fall.

Immediate first issue: Ben Aris, as well as most of his Western colleagues CANNOT have competent opinion on crisis management anywhere, let alone in Russia, because Western "economics" and experience knows only ONE way of dealing with crisis--it is to print money, period. The way even Covid-19 has been handled in EU and the United States is the best testimony not only to the impotence and incompetence of Western "elites", of which Ben Aris and his "way of thinking" are an exhibit A, but underscored a dramatic deference between the way Russian current elites and Western ones are brought up. One of those gigantic differences, which Aris never heard of, I am sure, is mandatory annual courses, ranging between two weeks-long to months, by top government officials and governors they take in the Academy of General Staff of Russia's Armed Forces. How mobilization plans are developed and implemented is also a thing Aris most likely doesn't understand, especially if one considers a collection of clowns running modern West today, they and Aris have common "education" backgrounds. So, Aris' any opinion on adequacy or otherwise of Russia's crisis management is as valuable as my opinions in Kabuki dramaturgy.

But Aris doesn't stop here and produces another peculiar point. 

Putin is afraid the nationwide vote, now slated to happen sometime in the summer, could be turned into a referendum on his ability to deal with the public health crisis. And that could go badly wrong. Consequently, he has pushed the responsibility for dealing with the crisis onto regional governors, who have put in a mixed showing so far. But even this political damage-control move has already cost Putin politically. More Russians approve of local officials’ coronavirus-response efforts than they do of those initiated by the president and the federal government, according to a newly published survey from the Levada Center.

There is so much to unpack here in what is a characteristic feature of most Western media--making shit up or just simply lying--that we need to start with the data by Levada Center. Levada Center was officially declared in Russia a foreign agent (in Russian) and is a classic example of MO of Western NGOs around the world--growing own "dissidents" and then using them as data sources which are allegedly "reliable" and fit Western "perceptions". I wrote about this so many times that I do not see any reason to dwell on that for much longer. Aris' "independent pollsters" are provided for by foreign governments and NGOs. The only good reason of using anything from Levada Center and similar orgs inside Russia is in affirmation of positive. E.g. "even Levada Center cannot deny this..."  Of course, I am not talking about the fact that Aris does what people like him do--he misinterprets, lies that is, events suited to consumption by people completely isolated from Russia's realities. See highlighted in yellow. Obviously, Aris never took even basic course in civics in any Russian public high school and he doesn't know how many Federation subjects are there in Russia, from Districts, to Oblast, to Krai and who are in charge of those and what is their relation to Moscow, but it is expected from such journalists as Aris. So, he "discovered" suddenly that delegation of authority, which is in the foundation of any practical governing since the times of Roman Empire, to state's subjects is the evidence of... political damage control? Is this Aris dude for real? It is especially fascinating against the background of Putin being omnipresent in Russian media. Including TV. Like yesterday. 

But our indomitable British journo doesn't stop here, he continues to misrepresent a situation and uses ephemera polls (polling is a fraud as an indicator in general, GIGO) to present what is not there forgetting what "Even Levada Center cannot deny..." Putin's still high level of approval which is almost 80% higher than disapproval. That is the only metric which matters. 

This is not to mention VCIOM's very own:

69% of Russians trust Vladimir Putin; 63.5% approve of his presidential performance.

So, what is exactly the problem here? A seasonal fluctuations of polls or that Russia's response to Covid-19 was extraordinarily effective? And even when Aris gets to more-or-less sensible argumentation (not that it is correct, it is not) he already "registered" himself at the onset of his piece as just yet another, run-of-the-mill, Russia "observer" whose only selling point is his fake "expertise" in interpreting political events in Russia from the Western point of view, which, as we could observe for years now, is nothing more than a wishful thinking by people who have zero knowledge and skills in fields which really matter for a nation such as Russia. In this case, the only question which remains is: will they ever learn? Why, in the same time, RT decided to publish this trash remains a complete mystery to me, albeit against the background of the collapse of Western economies and fraudulent "theories" behind them, any product of those in terms of world-view and "education", especially in relation to Russia, will come across as a pretentious ignoramus who needs to be pitied, not taken seriously. Or, maybe, to be taken as a necessary evil to remind us all how such "experts" royally fvcked Western civilization.  

P.S. Completely forgot (in Russian). Goggle Translate will help. 

Russia dramatically increased her oil export in April. Enjoy. 

Quoting Michael Hudson.

You all know my attitude towards Michael Hudson as one the brightest economic minds of our time. Here is a quote from one of his latest interviews, as always, loaded with insights and food for thought. 

Now Herman Kahn and I on another occasion went to the Treasury Department, and we talked about what the world would look like on a gold standard. I said, “Gold is a peaceful metal. If you have to pay in gold, no country with a gold standard can afford to go to war anymore. Because a war would entail a foreign exchange payment, and you’d have to pay this foreign exchange in gold, not IOUs, and you would end up going broke pretty quickly.” Needless to say, someone from the Defense Department said, “That’s why we’re not going to do it.”

How do we know that payments in gold bankrupt warring parties? Simple, really. Check where did British gold reserves go in the time span between September 1939 and the end of 1940. The whole mechanism of Great Britain becoming a financial lap dog of the United States throughout WW II is extremely well described  by Barnett. 

The last months of England's existence as a fully independent great power, able out of her own resources both to maintain her national existence and to wage war, passed away.  By the third quarter of 1940 the volume of British exports (including munitions for the empire) was down 37% on 1935. By the turn of the year 1940-1941, the dark mid-winter of the Blitz, England's stock of gold and dollars was near exhaustion... For obvious reasons the advent of "lend-Lease" was represented as an act of unparalleled generosity. In fact, it was clearly to America's advantage that American weapons should be carried into battle by fighting men of England and Empire rather than the sons of American mothers. Even after United States entered the war in December 1941--and not then by her own volition--it was still clearly to her advantage that England should be enabled to wage the war on far greater scale than would have been possible on English resources alone. 

United States, obviously, learned her lessons from British WW II experience and recognized that to fight the real war one needs a lot of gold, or, as it turned out in 1970s when Nixon took the United States, which by then lost Vietnam War, from gold--IOUs. Yes, IOUs which are built around, well... let Michael Hudson speak:

The gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector. And probably they didn’t have debt in it either.

Modern Western "economists" do not operate with power element at all--it is beyond their grasp because unlike some financial theories, military power requires a much higher level of education and knowledge. Economists do not study physics, systems' integration, chemistry or weapons' design, not to mention operations, in the West they also do not study real economics. Yet, all this IOU (or T-Bills and other paper) alternative universe collapses the moment American IOUs lose the main factor behind their forceful "validity"--US military power, or, rather, myth of it and the threat to use it in case some renegades decide not to "trust" IOUs. Do not believe me, even as early as 2015 there were numerous calls from inside US "analytic" community to consider military operations against Russia. I recently wrote about one such ignoramus, George Fridman, who described in 2014 how Russia will be defeated in Ukraine by combined NATO forces. Yes, they ARE that dumb. 

I am not saying anything new here, once the myth of the US military power began to be destroyed in public space, everything else started to follow. By 2018 it was clear that United States cannot win conventional conflict with Russia not only in her vicinity, which was the case since 2010, but even in Europe. I am not talking about nuclear one, because this kills all other reasonable outcomes and expectations. Once you cannot win the war, what's your next step, what's you next default position, so to speak? Right, money, currency and financial "instruments" manipulation. Indeed, China buys Russian oil and gas and pays for it in Yuan or Euro, what can the United States  do about it? Attack Russia or China? Well, we know what's going to happen. So, the only instrument left are sanctions and financial sabotage. But that doesn't change the fact that China and Russia trade, at least significant part of their trade, in Rubles and Yuans. China is  much more vulnerable to intimidation and  blackmail than Russia, but still, this doesn't change the fact that China is not Venezuela or Iraq and she cannot be invaded without the United States sustaining catastrophic losses. 

The fact that US "elite" is incompetent across the board is not a secret anymore to those who matter, and those are China, Russia and, to a degree, Iran as an emerging regional superpower. So, as Hudson states, and I subscribe to his every word here:

By waging this economic warfare against China to protect America monopolies, America is integrating China and Russia. And probably the leading Chinese nationalist in the world, the leading Russian nationalist, is Donald Trump. He’s saying, “Look boys, I know that you’re influenced by American neoliberals. I’m gonna help you. I believe that you should be independent. I’m gonna help you Chinese, Russians and Iranians to be independent. I’m going to keep pushing sanctions on agriculture to make sure that you’re able to feed yourself. I’m gonna push sanctions on technology, to make sure that you can defend yourself.” So he obviously is a Chinese and Russian agent, just like MSNBC says.  

Ability to integrate a complex interaction between military and economic factors  into systemic and easily grasped picture is not there in the US. The whole generation (or two) of the economic ignoramuses who can operate only in the world of neo-liberal voodoo and reign of financial capital has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union and it is incompetent, not able to face the realities, especially military realities of the 21st century, which define the catastrophic departure of the United States from her real, and perceived, greatness. "Economy" built on speculation and selling the snake oil of IOUs, or which depends on such news as this:

The explosion on the tanker in the northern Syrian city of Afrin killed at least 10 people, Reuters reported, citing initial reports from Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency Tuesday. News of the bomb detonation led to a rise in oil's “risk premium, even in a market with a glut of crude,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at The Price Futures Group, told MarketWatch. Against that backdrop, the front-month June West Texas Intermediate crude (CLM20) briefly traded as high of $13.69 a barrel before turning lower again to settle down by 44 cents, or 3.4%, at $12.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Is not sustainable, especially when it lost its power to coerce anyone who matters into believing that Wall Street IS the economy, which it is not. But we all are yet to face unfolding reckoning of REAL valuation and that will shake the global economy to its foundation. Just some thoughts for today.   

Any Silver Linings?

Everyone knows what is going on, but behind this coronavirus hysteria one should not forget that oil "wars", coronavirus, wide-spread chronic constipation or Joe Biden being a senile imbecile, there is a much larger reality of what I (and many people who are much smarter than me) write about for years--a systemic severe crisis of the so called liberalism.  Those factors listed above are just primers, the needles which help to puncture the bubble. The so called liberal, a euphemism for wholesale financial speculation, economic model doesn't work. It never, actually, did. Here is a small reminder: Glass-Steagall Act, aka 1933 Banking Act which separated commercial and investment (euphemism for speculation and robbing people) banks. It was a good idea, to leave commercial banks to customers, both individual and corporate, to make deposits, take out loans, what have you. So called "investment" banks were left to those who had too much money and time on their hands to play. And then came 1999. 

Gramm-Leach-Biley Act (GLBA) which removed Glass-Steagall, was this nail in the coffin of the American market and industry. Bill Clinton signed it into law. Make no mistake, when 2008 hit--there were many US "economists" who argued that this crisis (driven by the subprime mortgage fraud by banks) had nothing to do with all the removal Glass-Steagall. Oh, well, maybe it didn't, may be it did but GLBA had a metaphysical influence on the US and global economy by helping to shift the meaning of "economic growth" squarely to the simulacra of "earnings". You see, "earnings" do not necessarily mean actual economic growth, in fact, as you all can observe "earnings" in the United States were doing just fine in the last 12 years, because in 2008 American "elites" bailed out people (and their banks) which were the MAIN reason for 2008 crisis. They gave them even more money and told them to keep the "earnings" gravy train rolling. They did. It resulted in further de-industrialization of the United States which, inevitably, brought about this:

This year, as part of the Spring 2017 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Professors Case and Deaton are following up on that research to further investigate the rise and its causes, examining midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics in the U.S. by geography, education, birth cohort, and more. Dividing the country into 1,000-plus regions, the authors find that the rate of “deaths of despair” (deaths by drugs, alcohol, and suicide) in midlife for white non-Hispanics rose in nearly every part of the country and at every level of urbanization—from deep rural areas to large central cities—hitting men and women similarly. In 2000, the epidemic was centered in the southwest. By the mid-2000s it had spread to Appalachia, Florida, and the west coast. Today, it’s country-wide.

And this: 

Take this one telling statistic: About 46 percent of Americans said they did not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense. Instead, they would have to put it on a credit card and pay it off over time, borrow from friends or family, or simply not cover it at all.

So, how can one reconcile these startling facts with constantly declared "recovery" from 2008 and "earnings" going up, and up, and up? Very simple: remove actual economy from considerations, you know, the economy where people go to work, earn money by producing things and providing necessary services, and completely substitute it with false equivalency of the so called "banking" which deals with things, for the most part, which have no relation to reality. Recall this? Moreover, there were even cretins who wrote a truckload of books on "investing" (another simulacra for covering for speculation) promising Dow Jones hitting 40,000. There was only one problem--the "earnings" providing good ROI (Return of "Investment") could be achieved only in the world of virtual money and virtual speculation with the so called "financial instruments" which are nothing more than pseudo-financial snake oil packaged into the shiny vessel of promises and BS about more, more, more--an institutionalized and praised, and encouraged, greed and failure of human decency. One couldn't make "earnings" of this scale if one was involved in actual productive labor and business. Things work differently in those fields where one, actually, has to consider actual costs and care about people and main capital. In general, margins are lower there. In "finances" one has to have a degree in some self-contained fraudulent field known today as "economics" and be able to devise ways to defraud everything that is still capable to produce value. Wall Street won, America lost. 

Now we observe a collapse of this whole house of cards based on virtual reality, but it was going to happen ANYWAY, no matter the factors accelerating this bubble's demise. Once the whole ocean of bankruptcies, misery, political turmoil and possibly violence recedes, we will be able to see the actual US economy, or whatever is left of it, assessed not in fraudulent petrodollar but in terms of its actual worth and I can predict confidently--the picture will be ugly. But enough with gloom and doom. What are those possible silver linings. I think the first, most important one, could be a complete bankruptcy of current US "elites" who are responsible for this chaos and a chance (just a chance) of new people coming to remove them. It is a chance, but a good chance since current US "elites" are not capable to fix something that cannot be fixed and they will fvck it up one way or another, no matter a number of political and media demagogues they will release on population, or number of genders they will discover, or number of woke imbeciles they will recruit to support the status-quo, because objective reality as was stated long time ago by none other than Lenin today IS reducible to a major signs of revolution  which is in progress, two of them are already in place:

(a) A crisis in the upper classes, a crisis in the policy of the ruling classes, when it is impossible to maintain their rule without any change,
(b) The suffering of the oppressed classes and their wants has grown more acute. That is, suffering would be intolerable,

No, there will be no "socialist revolution" in the United States, plus American population and especially millennials are brainwashed and were made addicted to drugs and wokeness to such a degree that it is impossible, and that is for the better, but election of Donald Trump and undeniable prominence (despite sabotage from DNC) of such a fraud as Bernie, designed to let the steam off the actual left economic aspirations of the American youth, which will have to pay for the greed and insanity of baby boomers, are very important signs of the above mentioned points (a) and (b). So, the coming of new people is not only possible, but it is inevitable. That is, of course, if the United States preserves itself as a country. And let's hope that those new people will bewith the instinct of self-preservation, everything else may follow.

The United States, if it emerges from this intact and without unleashing a global war, will be a much poorer nation (it already is) than it is being perceived by many, but  it will be forced to live within its means and that means no more wars. Neither China nor Russia, let alone Iran plan to attack the United States. The United States itself is a very resources rich country and it can fully support itself, especially if there will be desire to convert (Russia is already doing this) large parts of the US military-industrial complex from making mediocre but extremely expensive weapons, which are not really needed, to production of things people really need for living--from kitchen combines to sophisticated medical and manufacturing technology. In the end, I am sick and tired of buying Chinese-made socks, or hauling a load of those 100% cotton ones from Russia.  In the long run that means a return of at least some industries to the United States and that gives me some hope to be buried in a goddamn US-made coffin instead of one made in China or wherever COSTCO buys those nowadays. So, you see, there are some benefits in the long run for the United States. So, do not despair. Reality is not only wrought with suffering but with opportunity, but learning from mistakes is a must. This current American political class is not capable of learning but the next very well may be. Voices of reasons are heard from many quarters today. Like this:

We thought the Cold War vindicated our political system. Instead it only began an age of illusions.

It is, in the end, time to learn something valuable from American experiences and real (I underscore it--real) history and this learning is in itself a silver lining. We all may yet be all right in the long run.