French LOL Of The Day...

No, I mean it...

France is ready to face whatever developments unfold internationally and is prepared for the “toughest engagements” to protect itself, the chief of staff of the French Army, Gen. Pierre Schill, said in an interview published on Tuesday.

Somebody has to tell this Pierre Schill, that nobody gives a shit about France and nobody intends to "engage" this chihuahua unless French go and fight Russia, LOL)) Yeah, Macron wants to send 2,000 of those mighty French warriors. Good luck to them, even lurking in the operational rear doesn't guarantee survival for those poor poor dears . 

Meanwhile incomparable Michael Hudson with Nima. 

Indeed, NATO really believed its own BS. The Russian truism remains... truism--each hundred years combined West goes to Russia to have its ass handed to it.

Good Points From Larry. Michael Hudson On Reindustrialization.

Larry also talks about Cold War 1.0. 

I anticipate that Russia will intensify its attacks on Ukrainian positions at key locations along the 800 mile line of contact in the next two weeks. While NATO is scrambling to provide Ukraine with actionable intelligence to try to damage the Russian capabilities, Zelensky and his Generals confront a harsh reality that first class intelligence is useless if you do not have the manpower or equipment to make a major dent in Russian defenses. Ukraine’s military grows weaker with each fruitless attack.

I agree with Andrei that the promised escalation by France and the U.K. is likely to provoke a Russian response. It is one thing to covertly provide more sophisticated lethal weaponry to Ukraine. Recall that the Soviets did it to the Americans in Vietnam and that the United States did it to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both the Americans and the Russians quietly agreed to live with those actions without risking escalation into a direct conflict. They continued to have normal diplomatic contacts and negotiated arms control agreements in spite of the covert proxy wars. Each side knew what the other was doing but each side also took steps to try to hide their actions.

And here is the key: during the Cold War 1.0 there was an EXPLICIT understanding on both sides of consequences of nuclear exchange. Today, meaning the post-Cold War 1.0 period, both Washington and Brussels convinced themselves that that they are super-pooper powers with Russia's economy being (depending on the time period and imbeciles who have been spewing this BS) "smaller" than that of Portugal, Netherlands, Spain, Italy etc. In Cold War 1.0 the superpower club was a very exclusive one. Well, in Warm War 1.0 some chihuahuas decided that they may pretend to be in it. No, this club is still very exclusive, but now has three members: China, US and Russia. There is a pecking order in military balance and it is being enforced as I type this. Plus, neocons and Pentagon caretakers on their payroll do not know how to fight a real war. 

That brings us to Michael Hudson's brilliant summary of the combined West "economy". In his excellent interview with the ominous title Why the U.S. Economy cannot Re-Industrialize, he explains in detail this ever present real industrial factor, which IS in the foundation of the military might:

But there’s one problem, when they graduated with their PhD, there’s really only two jobs for economists in the economy: one is to drive a cab and the other is to teach. But in order to teach, you have to be hired according to how many journal articles you write for the most prestigious journals. And almost all the journal articles are controlled by the economics departments of colleges like the University of Chicago, or Berkeley, that are funded by the banks, and the large foundations. And so if you don’t publish in these journals, by saying what the neoliberals, the monetarists, the junk economists say, then you’re not going to get hired. So of course our students did get hired, but not by Harvard, or the University of Chicago, or Princeton, or Columbia. They could get hired by the New School here in New York, and by others, but there is a almost total censorship. And some students came from Asia, and they’ve gone back to Asia. Some were my colleagues in China, and Hong Kong, folks studied at UMKC. But you have the control imposing junk economics in the United States, by the media, such as The New York Times, is almost as strong as their control over reporting about the Ukraine war, as if Ukraine’s winning, and not losing.

They’re saying as if deindustrialization is helping us move into the post-industrial society of mass unemployment and homelessness, as if that’s a good thing. Well, it is a good thing for the 1%, because they get to feel, we’re really it. We’re really the new lords, the financial lords, not landlords, who are also in debt to us, to borrow. So that’s really the situation. Ultimately, if people don’t have a mental model in their mind of how the world works, and how it should work, to promote prosperity, they believe with Margaret Thatcher, as you said, that “there is no alternative.” And the function of economic education is to try to brainwash students into thinking there is no alternative.

This is precisely why I do not treat West's "economic" statistics seriously and do not read propaganda outlets such as WSJ or Economist, among many others, only on rare occasions, because those who write and are published there are not real academicians, despite numerous Ph.Ds. Neither does SVR, General Staff, FSB and other serious Russian government analytical outlets who made a precise forecast of West's "capabilities" or, rather lack thereof, on the eve of issuing ultimatum in December 2021 by both clandestine and open deconstruction of the US economic "data". Hudson also makes a superb observation of the role of anti-labor policies which effectively destroyed American industry. And here is a control shot to the head by Hudson:

The other day I was asked, how are you going to get China, and Saudi Arabia, and African, and South American countries all to work together? They all have such different religions, and ethnicities, and social status. Well, the common denominator is, they’re all wage earners. And they all have a common objective in making enough money, by working for a living, so that they can increase their living standards, have a home of their own, and have a shorter working day, and a less intensive, less exploitative, working conditions. That’s all the common denominator that you need for these countries to work together, and it should be all the common denominator that you need in the United States, but as long as people think there are only two alternatives, the Republicans or the Democrats, well, that’s the same thing as saying there’s no alternative to the 1%, the FIRE sector, ruling society.

Exactly.  Now think why Comrade Xi received Valentina Matvienko. She is a big parliamentary honcho--a Chair of the Federation Council (Senate), but still. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted a top Russian senator, Valentina Matvienko, for talks in Beijing on Monday. The high-profile negotiations revolved around strengthening ties between the two nations, as well as their joint multinational projects. “China is ready to continue to work with Russia to develop a new era of comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership that is mutually supportive, deeply integrated, pioneering and innovative, and mutually beneficial to help rejuvenate the two countries and promote a prosperous, stable, fair and just world,” Xi said during the meeting, which involved multiple senior officials from the two countries. Moscow and Beijing should “lead the correct direction of global governance reform,” Xi stressed, underlining that the development of the bilateral ties has become “a strategic choice made by both countries based on their own national and people’s fundamental interests.” Xi added that the importance of developing ties within such multinational groups as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS.

You all know now that Iran is a full member of SCO, right?

A Superb Piece by Michael Hudson.

America indeed destroyed a great empire.  

It has de-industrialized its own economy, and its idea of foreign investment is to carve out monopoly-rent seeking opportunities by concentrating technological monopolies and control of oil and grain trade in U.S. hands, as if this is economic efficiency, not rent-seeking. What has occurred is a change in consciousness. We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want. Their aim is not merely to create alternatives to the use of dollars, but an entire new set of institutional alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the International Criminal Court and the entire array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have hijacked from the United Nations.

The upshot will be civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor. The idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards is finally facing its reckoning.

Hudson, ever astute, points out what many in economics world of the West wanted to always ignore. 

In addition to having to subsidize domestic European gas to prevent widespread insolvency, a large proportion of German Leopard tanks, U.S. Patriot missiles and other NATO “wonder weapons” are being destroyed in combat against the Russian army. It has become clear that the U.S. strategy is not simply to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but to fight to the last tank, missile and other weapon being deleted from NATO stocks. This depletion of NATO’s arms was expected to create a vast replacement market to enrich America’s military-industrial complex. Its NATO customers are being told to increase their military spending to 3 or even 4 percent of GDP. But the weak performance of U.S. and German arms on the Ukrainian battlefield may have crashed this dream, while Europe’s economies are sinking into depression. 

Exactly! And, in the end, in warfare the reputation of weapon systems matters and the US military-industrial complex has been finally exposed.

Excellent.

But then again, this is Michael Hudson with his incredibly informed opinion. 

IF... if Ukraine exists then. 

Something About The Future.

Michael Hudson sent me today the article, which appeared earlier at Naked Capitalism. I re-post this excellent piece with Michael Hudson's permission. It is a very important piece. 

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The Euro Without German Industry

The reaction to the sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in four places on Monday, September 26, has focused on speculations about who did it and whether NATO will make a serious attempt to discover the answer. Yet instead of panic, there has been a great sigh of diplomatic relief, even calm. Disabling these pipelines ends the uncertainty and worries on the part of US/NATO diplomats that nearly reached a crisis proportion the previous week, when large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the sanctions to end and to commission Nord Stream 2 to resolve the energy shortage. 

The German public was coming to understand what it will mean if their steel companies, fertilizer companies, glass companies and toilet-paper companies were shutting down. These companies were forecasting that they would have to go out of business entirely – or shift operations to the United States – if Germany did not withdraw from the trade and currency sanctions against Russia and permit Russian gas and oil imports to resume, and presumably to fall back from their astronomical eight to tenfold price increase.

Yet State Department hawk Victoria Nuland already had stated in January that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward” if Russia responded to the accelerating Ukrainian military attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. President Biden backed up U.S. insistence on February 7, promising that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. … I promise you, we will be able to do it.”

Most observers simply assumed that these statements reflected the obvious fact that German politicians were fully in the US/NATO pocket. Germany’s politicians held fast turbines refusing to authorize Nord Stream 2, and Canada soon seized the Siemens dynamos needed to send gas through Nord Stream 1. That seemed to settle matters until German industry – and a rising number of voters – finally began to calculate just what blocking Russian gas would mean for Germany’s industrial firms, and hence domestic employment.

Germany’s willingness to self-impose an economic depression was wavering – although not its politicians or the EU bureaucracy. If policymakers were to put German business interests and living standards first, NATO’s common sanctions and New Cold War front would be broken. Italy and France might follow suit. That prospect made it urgent to take the anti-Russian sanctions out of the hands of democratic politics.

Despite being an act of violence, sabotaging the pipelines has restored calm to US/NATO diplomatic relations. There is no more uncertainty about whether Europe may break away from U.S. diplomacy by restoring mutual trade and investment with Russia. The threat of Europe breaking away from the US/NATO trade and financial sanctions against Russia has been solved, seemingly for the foreseeable future. Russia has announced that the gas pressure is falling in three of the four pipelines, and the infusion of salt water will irreversibly corrode the pipes. (Tagesspiegel, September 28.)

 Where do the euro and dollar go from here?

Looking at how this will reshape the relationship between the U.S. dollar and the euro, one can understand why the seemingly obvious consequences of Germany, Italy and other European economies severing trade ties with Russia have not been discussed openly. The solution is a German and indeed Europe-wide economic crash. The next decade will be a disaster. There may be recriminations against the price paid for letting Europe’s trade diplomacy be dictated by NATO, but there is nothing that Europe can do about it. Nobody (yet) expects it to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. What is expected is for its living standards to plunge.

German industrial exports and attraction of foreign investment inflows were major factors supporting the euro’s exchange rate. To Germany, the great attraction in moving from the deutsche mark to the euro was to avoid its export surplus pushing up the D-mark’s exchange rate and pricing German products out of world markets. Expanding the eurozone to include Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and other countries running balance-of-payments deficits prevented the euro from soaring. That protected the competitiveness of German industry.

After its introduction in 1999 at $1.12, the euro sank to $0.85 by July 2001, but recovered and indeed rose to $1.58 in April 2008. It has been drifting down steadily since then, and since February of this year the sanctions have driven the euro’s exchange rate below parity with the dollar, to $0.97 this week.

The major deficit problem has been rising prices for imported gas and oil, and products such as aluminum and fertilizer requiring heavy energy inputs for their production. And as the euro’s exchange rate declines against the dollar, the cost of carrying Europe’s US-dollar debt – the normal condition for affiliates of U.S. multinationals –rises, squeezing profits.

This is not the kind of depression in which “automatic stabilizers” can work to restore economic balance. Energy dependency is structural. To make matters worse, the eurozone’s economic rules limit its budget deficits to just 3% of GDP. This prevents its national governments supporting the economy by deficit spending. Higher energy and food prices – and dollar-debt service – will leave much less income to be spent on goods and services.

As a final kicker, pointed out by Pepe Escobar on September 28 that “Germany is contractually obligated to purchase at least 40 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year until 2030. … Gazprom is legally entitled to get paid even without shipping gas. … Berlin does not get all the gas it needs but still needs to pay.” A long court battle can be expected before money will change hands. And Germany’s ultimate ability to pay will be steadily weakening.

It seems curious that the U.S. stock market soared over 500 points for the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Wednesday. Maybe the Plunge Protection Team was intervening to try and reassure the world that everything was going to be all right. But the stock market gave back most of these gains on Thursday as reality no longer could be brushed aside.

German industrial competition with United States is ending, helping the U.S. trade balance. But on capital account the euro’s depreciation will reduce the value of U.S. investments in Europe and the dollar-value of any profits they may still earn as the European economy shrinks. Reported global earnings by U.S. multinationals will fall.

 The effect of U.S. sanctions and the New Cold War outside of Europe

The ability of many countries to pay their foreign and domestic debts already was reaching the breaking point before the anti-Russian sanctions raised world energy and food prices. The sanctions-driven price increases have been compounded by the dollar’s rising exchange rate against nearly all currencies (ironically, except against the ruble, whose rate has soared instead of collapsing as U.S. strategists tried in vain to make happen). International raw materials are still priced mainly in dollars, so the dollar’s currency appreciation is further raising import prices for most countries.

The rising dollar also raises the local currency cost of servicing foreign debts denominated in dollars. Many European and Global South countries already have reached the limit of their ability to service their dollar-denominated debts, and are still coping with the impact of the Covid pandemic. Now that US/NATO sanctions have driven up world prices for gas, oil and grain – and with the dollar’s appreciation raising the cost of servicing dollar-denominated debts – these countries cannot afford to import the energy and food that they need to live if they have to pay their foreign debts. Something has to give.

On Tuesday, September 27, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shed crocodile tears and said that attacking Russian pipelines was “in no one’s interest.” But if that really were the case, no one would have attacked the gas lines. What Mr. Blinken really was saying was “Don’t ask Cui bono.” I don’t expect NATO investigators to go beyond accusing the usual suspects that U.S. officials automatically blame.

U.S. strategists must have a game plan for how to proceed from here. They will try to maintain a neoliberalized global economy for as long as they can. They will use the usual ploy for countries unable to pay their foreign debts: The IMF will lend them the money to pay – on the condition that they raise the foreign exchange to repay by privatizing what remains of their public domain, natural-resource patrimony and other assets, selling them to U.S. financial investors and their allies.

Will it work? Or will debtor countries band together and work out ways to restore the world of affordable oil and gas prices, fertilizer prices, grain and other food prices, metals and raw materials supplied by Russia, China and their allied Eurasian neighbors, without U.S. “conditionalities” such as have ended European prosperity?

An alternative to the U.S.-designed neoliberal order is the great worry for U.S. strategists. They cannot solve the problem as easily as sabotaging Nord Stream 1 and 2. Their solution probably will be the usual U.S. approach: military intervention and new color revolutions hoping to gain the same power over Global South and Eurasia that America’s diplomacy via NATO wielded over Germany and other European countries.

The fact that U.S. expectations for how anti-Russian sanctions would work out against Russia have been just the reverse of what actually has happened gives hope for the world’s future. The opposition and even contempt by U.S. diplomats toward other countries acting in their own economic interest deems it a waste of time (and indeed, to be unpatriotic) to contemplate how foreign countries might develop their own alternative to the U.S. plans. The assumption underlying this U.S. tunnel vision is that There Is No Alternative – and that if they don’t think about such a prospect, it will remain unthinkable.

But unless other countries work together to create an alternative to the IMF, World Bank, International Court, World Trade Organization and the numerous UN agencies now biased toward the U.S/NATO by U.S. diplomats and their proxies, the coming decades will see the U.S. economic strategy of financial and military dominance unfold along the lines that Washington has planned. The question is whether these countries can develop an alternative new economic order to protect themselves from a fate like that which Europe this year has imposed upon itself for the next decade. 

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Enjoy. I did.

Larry Gets Mathematical...

... and that's the way you do it.  

Russia not only has destroyed Ukraine’s stockpiles that existed at the start of the war, but it is eliminating planes, tanks and MRLS systems subsequently provided by NATO and the United States. Has Ukraine destroyed some Russian aircraft, helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles? Yes. But so what. Russian losses are only a minuscule fraction of their total strength and Russia, unlike Ukraine, has factories that are continuing to produce equipment and weapons lost or expended during the course of this conflict.

So with these numbers in mind, carefully consider what is happening to Ukraine’s military force in its current offensive. It is being decimated. Capturing a rural village or two or pushing the Donetsk or Luhansk militias backwards a few kilometers is tactically insignificant. The truth of the matter is that Russia is relying on the Donbas militias to do the bulk of the front line fighting because it is home for those militias. Claims that the Russian military has suffered major casualties is delusional because the Russian forces are in the rear and providing fire support–ground and air–to the Donbas militias. Yes, there are some Russian troops on the frontlines in some places, but the cold, hard fact is that Russia has not committed a significant portion of its total military forces to the battle. Not yet, anyway. The reality, which the United States and NATO are loathe to accept, is that Russia’s defeat of the Ukrainian military is inevitable; even if the United States or NATO made the suicidal decision to send their own forces into the fray.

Read the whole thing at Larry's blog. Meanwhile, listen to these 15 minutes of incomparable Michael Hudson's explanation of compound interest and how it defines the race between real productive forces and banksters' and Wall Street mafia and why creative industrial capitalism is doomed...

... to be sacrificed at the altar of one percenters' greed, perversion and insanity.

They (Neocons) May Have Anger Issues...

UNZ published a transcript of an excellent conversation between Pepe Escobar and Michael Hudson, which you can watch here:

It is a delightful, in its intellect and scope, 2 hours of back and forth, but one thought by Michael Hudson stands out when he speaks about people in the United States who are driving US' insane foreign policy or, rather, lack of it. I touch on this issue in each and every of my books, but especially the last one, but here is what Hudson, who is close to "decision-making" circles posits:

The Americans want war. The people that Biden has appointed have an emotional hatred of Russia. I’ve spoken to government people who are close to the Democratic Party, and they’ve told me that there’s a pathological emotional desire for war with Russia, largely stemming from the fact that the Tzars were anti-Semitic and there’s still the hatred about their ancestors: “Look what they did to my great-grandfather.” And so they’re willing to back the Nazis, back the anti-Semites in Ukraine. They’re willing to back today’s anti-Semites all over the world as long as they’re getting back at this emotional focus on a kind of post 19^th-century economy. I’ve met these people. Their emotion is one of hatred and anger. You can look at their face and see what they’ve become. This is really dangerous. They are crazy. And Putin is quite right. America has got its power by breaking contracts. It broke all of the contracts with the native Americans to take their land. It’s broken the Iranian contract. It broke most recently the Ukrainian Minsk agreement, and the JCP before. So what’s the point of making an agreement with any Americans

Here is what I am constantly trying to stress--you do not negotiate with a mad bunch, especially afflicted with a narrow ethno-religious trauma, which over the years is being re-amplified in an echo-chamber of the American Jewish immigration, whose ascendance to the very top of the American political power and influence in the post-WW II period came through what some, wrongly, continue to view as intellectual neoconservative (Trotskyist) movement, which was neither "conservative", in any applicable sense nor, most importantly, intellectual. American neoconservative movement is a combination of a shoddy scholarship, if not altogether outright pseudo-religious demagoguery and falsification, and of a masterful, needs to be admitted, manipulation with the American propensity for self-aggrandizing for the reasons which, in reality, go completely counter to the interests of the majority of American population.  

That is why Lavrov today was explicit when stated that "confrontation in bi-lateral relations reached bottom" (in Russian). I may only add that down the road expect the knock from below. And here is the point--American neoconservatism is extremely illiterate in some of the most crucial  aspects of the national security and that is warfare and competent diplomacy. Even a brief review of "intellectual" concoctions by the America's neocons, be that risible Fukuyama's psychobabble, which is neocon in its essence, or any type of Kagan family cabal's bloviation on matters of history and war--American neoconservatism was never competent. It is sure as hell marked by the crusading spirit against human nature and history but that is as far as it goes. So, you cannot explain to a bunch of American Jewish or WASP neocon "scholars" and "influencers" sucking on the teat of America's real and perceived power that before they undertake any practical action based on their loony theories, they better do basic cost-benefit analysis and this one is precisely about them willing to continue to hate Russia at the cost of being turned into radioactive, or just simple, inert, ash or they would want a benefit of staying alive, which comes with resorting to a more peaceful posture. 

This is precisely the occasion on which one makes the case not in terms of "policy", "agreements" or "balance", but in terms of how and where people who push for war, and that is about 99.99% of America's neocon cabal, will get it and how it will look like. In other words, one shows them the weapon by which they will be killed in case they want to unleash a war. Considering the fact that American neocons are not good militarily, in fact many of them are the ones who drive incompetent American militarist propaganda, one is forced to put it in terms those people, who never experienced anything beyond the danger, as Phil Giraldi put it "of chocking on foie gras"  or Power Point applications getting frozen during the presentation or yet another pseudo-academic BS in neocon think-tanks, in terms those people can understand. Neocons, while loving to play with the lives of others, are extremely sensitive to a death coming their way. It is one of the reasons why we still all live in a relatively peaceful environment. 

They do understand and are scared of death. Even when they are convinced, due to their technological, operational and tactical illiteracy, that when Putin stated in February 2019 this:

Feb. 20 (UPI) — Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a national address Wednesday Moscow could target the United States if it moves new missiles into eastern Europe, after the scrapping of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. In his State of the Nation address, Putin threatened to target countries in Europe and the United States with new intermediate-range missiles if similar missiles are stationed against Russia in neighboring European nations. He said such a scenario would target U.S. decision-making centers.

He didn't mean the White House, Pentagon or, say, Capitol--no, coordinates of those are contained in the guidance computers of Russia's weapon systems since my tender childhood. Same as Kremlin or Russia's government House are in the American ones. Nothing new here. This is not news and this is not what Putin was talking about. As I state constantly, modern weapon systems have a an unprecedented precision and accuracy. You can today, literally, fly a cruise missile into the window of a house if you have to. Russia's stand-off systems, moreover, have unprecedented ranges. So, if any of the warmongers thinks that they maybe safe in New Zealand or Patagonia--they are really wrong. Nuclear weapons are easy, but those are non-nuclear ones which allow to receive targeting and deliver a salvo of cruise missiles anywhere in the world by means of moving a submarine into firing position anywhere around the globe, including but not limited to Patagonia, New Zealand, Australia or Antarctica, for a good measure. Modern targeting systems of Russia, such as Liana, which is already operational, are high orbit satellite constellations (1,000 + km) which are safe from modern Western anti-satellite missiles, not to mention other means of reconnaissance and targeting which are networked  and well protected. 

In the end, Russian special ops, which also have a very good record of clandestine deployments around the world, do not care where modern SSN or SSGN will deploy them--in South America or Asia. And that is what Putin meant by "decision-making centers". Anyone responsible for unleashing hell on Earth will be found and annihilated either in some specific building in Europe or the US, or will be annihilated or captured personally anywhere in the world. Many forget, that in 1996, the leader of Chechen separatists Dzhohar Dudaev was killed by laser guided bombs with targeting provided based on his use of satellite telephone. That was 25 years ago. Since then Russia moved into the revolutionary warfare territory both in terms of C4ISR and in terms of weapons and that is why if any plans of "sitting out" a war between Russia and NATO exist in the midst of US warmongers, most of them from neocon zoo, the explanation of impossibility of such a plan is a matter of presentation and demonstration of what modern Russian weapon systems can do, and the names of those in US and Europe who push for war are well-known to Russians. This is precisely what Russia was doing for the last 7 years and this is the reason for increasing pitch of anti-Russian hysteria--I know, it is frustrating when one hates Russia more than anything but knows that one can only scream at her and not much more without the danger of being annihilated oneself. 

So, they get this crucial difference between being dead and alive and this is good. So, they want war but they will not get it on their terms--this is called an escalation dominance which comes in the way of real revolution in military affairs. While neocons studied political pseudo-science and ersatz history in US Ivy League universities, Russians were studying physics of flight and of signal processing, among many other things and that is why Russian don't have many doctrines--they have one, but this one works. The United States produces very many of them but as the chief editor of Russia’s popular military-analytical bi-monthly, Arsenal of Fatherland (Arsenal Otechestva), former cadre Russian Air Force officer Alexey Leonkov, states explicitly when commenting of the fact that Americans are global leaders in a number of developed strategies, that there is only one problem with all of them—they are not survivable when faced with reality. Neither are globalist plans on "Reset" which are now merely limited to US, which outlived its use for globalists, whose integral part American neocons are, and Europe which will be subdued and turned into the reservation for economic "units" without culture, nationality and humanity. 

This also explains a desperate desire of the United States to unleash a war, any kind of war in Ukraine and to get Russia into any kind of calamity there and make her spend her resources on  this shithole of a country. But here too, as it is a tradition, a huge miscalculation was made in 2014 and ever since because neocons who pushed this agenda listened to non-neocon but a typical bloviating Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski who preached his gospel of Russia's revival being utterly tied to Ukraine reintegrating into Russia. As always, the real situation was exactly the opposite. But they don't learn in D.C. because they cannot--they are ignorant to start with, plus hatred denies them access to the last remaining iota of common sense and knowledge and we have what we have today. But behind all of that is a systemic and irresolvable crisis of financial predatory capitalism, which goes under different monikers, but remains the same, as Michael Hudson astutely put it--the parasite finally ate the host. In this case, the neocon insanity in the US is merely a private symptom of a larger ailment.  

In related news. This is Russia moving her troops (some of it--yes, this is this proverbial netcentricity and C4ISR on the move) into Crimea a week ago. 

If Ukraine wants to really fight Russia--sure, let them. I wonder where all those Ukrainian "decision-making centers" are. Nah, I am being facetious--Russians know where, and who mans them, if you know what I mean. So, they better address their anger issues--that could be a good start.

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.   

So how does this end?

Stumbled upon yesterday's Michael Hudson's interview where he answers this question: 

Ross: Well, let me suggest that you were living in one of the most advanced oligarchies in the world at the moment. So how does this end?

Michael Hudson: Ha! The same way that Rome ended. In Rome the oligarchy always overreached itself, impoverishing the economy. In Rome that led to a Dark Age. We’re going to be entering something like that at the end of summer in this country, because you’re going to have many homeless pouring onto the street, many families losing their homes, small businesses who’ve had to go under, medium-sized businesses that have decided to sell out to the large private capital funds. The economy is not going to look very pretty.

Read the whole interview, especially oligarchy part, but while I agree with Hudson, I think one important detail must be added to purely economic outlook and I mean, of course, real economy. I read at Saker's site a very interesting piece by Ramin Mazaheri about millenials: Pity post-corona Millennials… if they don’t openly push socialism. Before going there let's remove a little 800 pound gorilla or two out of the way:

1. The term "socialism" as it is used in the United States is absolutely meaningless term because it doesn't cover all complexities of "socialist"  model which is way more complex than mere "state's (collective) ownership of the means of production". So when you read the term "socialism" be aware that even if to use adjusters for state's involvement into the economy it still wouldn't give people in the Western block any better understanding of such a complex phenomenon as socialism. One thing for sure, however, is that whatever "socialism" means under any particular circumstances it surely means ANTI-laissez faire'. This one applies well.

2. I am NOT a "socialist", despite giving Soviet version of it proper credit for a number of outstanding achievements in every single sphere of human activity ranging from culture, to economy, to war, to science and the list is huge. I am, however, in no way reluctant to discuss failures of said Soviet model nor am I a Marxist, despite using Marxist method in my analysis. I am an economic fusionist, who understands human nature and self-interest as NOT always rational, plus it is my long-standing position that Anglo-American economic "theories" are the theories created inside the environment which never knew Continental Warfare of any serious scale and are absolutely anti-scientific and are nothing more than ideological concoctions, especially as is the case for modern era. 

Now that this is out of the way, I have to give Mazaheri a credit where credit is due because he states some crucial truths about modern generation:   

... the very sectors where Millennials can be most often found – restaurants, retail, tourism, hospitality and creative – will be the most decimated by corona lockdowns. What’s more, this age group has – necessarily – the least seniority, experience and skills and thus they will be the first to be fired in every sector. Labor participation rate for Millennials had only just returned to pre-2008 levels, but – as I stressed to my often-dismissive elders – levels “returned” only via terrible part-time jobs, gig economy work and short-term contracts in Europe. How long will it take to return to (these fundamentally inferior) pre-2020 levels? ....if you thought Millennials were too sensitive before, then imagine how they will be after the corona trauma? There is no “victory” to be had here for the survivors – all they did was cower at home, sometimes snitch on their neighbors, and often couldn’t even risk trying to volunteer to help the elderly and vulnerable. This is going to create guilt and shame personally, mistrust and resentment socially, and a desire to save, hoard and not take risks economically.

Pay attention to the fact of this very generation being one of the most important pushers for legalization of pot and users of it, not to mention other drugs of choice, which automatically precludes them from entering a serious labor force thus reducing their already less than impressive competitiveness, once, especially the "level" of education in the American public schools is considered. Moreover, apart from drug problem it is also a generation of the most active Social Justice Warriors, namely people with a complete mental breakdown being exhibited daily all over every existent social media platform where this generation worships bat shit crazy Greta Thunberg, fights for the rights of the unicorns and goes "woke" in vast numbers daily. Make no mistake, this whole psychiatric event didn't start with millenials, it started with Boomers. So much so, that the best of them, people with enough intellect and consciousness to see what is going on, apologizing:

History will probably record that America’s Baby Boom generation threw one helluva party; Gen X was left with the sorry task of cleanup crew; and the Millennials ended up squatting in the repossessed haunted party-house when it was all over. On behalf of the Boomers, let me try to explain and apologize.

But it is too little, too late on a scale of generations. And I do feel sorry for generation which was convinced that FIRE economy was a viable one, it never was. In case of emergencies first casualty is always a service sector. Millenials, using Russian expression, were left at the broken trough. But if that wasn't bad enough, this generation, especially its urban "advanced" category of iPhone users, Elon Musk-worshiping, Beyonce listening, metrosexually sensitive, part is absolutely not ready for real life. They never were from the inception, and that is a huge problem. Them "pushing for socialism"? With all my respect to Mazaheri otherwise excellent piece, here is how their "pushing" looks like: 

I am sure American oligarchy couldn't have asked more for feeling absolutely secure in their position than Millenials' "socialist aspirations". It also makes a significant segment of Millenials who know how to shoot, fight and start fire in the woods, delightful by looking at their future victims. But I know what I am talking about from the rich personal experience of studying Marxism-Leninism not only in theory but seeing how this theory was applied to creating a powerful, technologically very advanced, military, massive economy and suppression apparatus of appropriate scale. After all, it was none other than Lenin himself who is on record that "Revolution is worth something only when it can defend itself"(c). Bingo! I doubt that liberal arts graduate who used to work in Starbucks as a barista and who knows all differences between iPhones and what Game of Thrones characters are all about, understands anything about basic tactics of urban combat or ever saw how a person dies. So, under these circumstances, the case for socialism's triumph in the US is rather weak. Increase in banditry, gangsterism, street violence--that goes without saying, it is to be expected, but not the push from generation of many splendored genders brought up on Star Wars "woke" versions for "socialism". Industrial plant and its labor force are a much better medium for arriving to the threshold of "socialist" aspirations simply because of a different cultural outlook. But never mind, we all should remember that Marx saw... the United States as the country perfectly primed for socialist revolution. Well, he abhorred Russia and Russians and I am not sure what a level of a butt-hurt would he have experienced should he lived long enough to witness the events of 1917. 

This is my only quibble for otherwise superb article which is worthy of reading. At this stage, however, we all should also expect a degree of social disobedience from many Americans who, actually, ARE bearers of a true spirit of freedom which could be one of those unforeseen factors for present American oligarchy who thinks that it had it all under control. Many Americans, and even some Russians (wink, wink) still believe in some inalienable, God-given rights and that it is on display today in Michigan. 

And liberty for all. This is the factor X in all of that, not to mention the fact...drum roll...of Democratic Party trying to sabotage the nation to have any chance this year at elections. Read attentively: I still didn't disclose my theory of which I stated some time ago, but more and more facts begin to emerge that make Covid-19 affair in the US look rather suspicious.