Cipheron on 29/12/2022 at 04:27
Doing some basic fact-checking
Quote Posted by monk
The U.S. has been dominating the global economy through Bretton Woods
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system)
Bretton Wood set a fixed price for the US dollar in terms of gold and was an exchange mechanism between a selected number of nations. Other nations weren't forced to be on that. It created exchange stability. So if you mean "dominated" by "had a stable currency" so people could trust US currency to maintain it's value, then yes, having a set exchange system made the US currency more desirable.
And you know what? having a locked in exchange rate makes you less competitive since it might not reflect the true underlying values of commodities and currencies. This creates a distortion that other actors who aren't you can then exploit to make a profit.
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later the petrodollar: the world economy uses the dollar as a reserve currency, and this has made the U.S. immensely powerful. At the same time, it has also been weakened for the same reason: it earns less because the value of the dollar is too high.
I'm not sure how this makes any sense. See what happened to the price of gold once Bretton Wood was abandoned: the price of gold shot through the roof. Bretton Woods was thus creating artificial upwards pressure on the currency values. They got rid of silver certificates in the 1960 for the same reason: silver was spiking in value due to increased manufacturing demand, so trying to peg the currency to silver wasn't viable.
Also the whole "Petrodollar" thing came about in the 1970s when the oil price shot through the roof and oil-exporters were suddenly flush with US dollars. It's literally nothing to do with the US dollar being a reserve currency any everything to do with the US being the biggest customer for oil exporters. This point doesn't make any sense, and it was the LOW value of the US dollar vs oil prices which caused the issue. And in fact, having lots of foreigners holding your dollars isn't exactly anti-growth. They're going to want to buy and invest with that money: invest in American stuff.
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That's why the country began to experience low economic growth starting in the early 1960s, then trade deficits plus a drop in real wages starting in the early 1970s, then heavy borrowing and spending starting in the early 1980s.
Except it didn't actually begin to "experience low economic growth starting in the early 1960s". Here's the US Bureau of Economic Analysis data:
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https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year)
There was a big recession in 1946 clearly because of the end of the war spending. Then, shitty growth until 1950, and then one good year, and it tapered off again. It actually started to pick up in the 1960s and that's the first time you get good, sustained growth going forward. The 1960s were actually one of the strongest decades.
I got GPT to split this by 5 year averages:
1945-1949: 3.69%
1950-1954: 3.82%
1955-1959: 4.68%
1960-1964: 3.47%
1965-1969: 5.86%
1970-1974: 2.67%
1975-1979: 3.59%
1980-1984: 2.77%
1985-1989: 3.47%
1990-1994: 2.77%
1995-1999: 3.61%
2000-2004: 3.19%
2005-2009: 2.82%
2010-2014: 2.38%
2015-2019: 2.24%
There hasn't been much of a decline at all. There are still 5-year spans such as 1995-1999 where growth was as good as the post-WWII period. Note the distinct lack of any specific decline which started in the early 1960s. Sure that 5-year patch was a bit weaker than the late 1950s, but then the *late* 1960s was even better.
Why would you misplace a decline in the 1960s? Is it because you're on a "decadent western values" kick, so you want to paint the "decline" as starting at the same time as the civil rights era and the counter-culture?
As for the drop in real wages, well that did peak in 1973 and declined a fair bit by the end of the 70s. However ... if you look at figures for median *household* income, those actually increased from 1973-1979. Sources:
(
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-in-one-chart/)
(
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N)
These are both inflation-adjusted. if you only look at the first chart it looks like people are getting poorer, but in the second chart, the typical *household* was in fact getting richer during the same time-period. How to reconcile these two data points? Keep in mind that a LOT of new people were entering the workforce in the 1970s - women. So the error was treating this as a zero-sum game and as atomic individuals, when in fact people are organized into economic units called "families" so to work out how people are doing, looking at families and not individuals is the correct data. More women entered the workforce, and this was on the whole, good for families. But more labor supply did in fact put downward pressure on individual wages.
America is a rich country, that's their strength. While people rightly bemoan wealth inequality, the idea that everyone in America is constantly getting worse off in every way, it turns out, isn't *quite* in line with reality. If that was actually the case then it wouldn't have in fact stayed a superpower for very long.
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Meanwhile, more conservatives reacted strongly to challenges to values, prompting neoconservatism.
This was coupled with liberals who were disillusioned by the lack of freedom in other countries, leading to the rise of liberal hawks.
At the same time, both liberals and conservatives pushed for more "freedoms" (liberal democracy for the first and free markets for the second), leading to the rise of neoliberalism.
This whole bit is confused. Firstly, why would it make sense for Conservatives to twist themselves into "Neo-Conservatives" due to some "change in values" among leftists. Conservatives were Conservatives before the civil-right eras, and they were Conservatives AFTER the civil-rights era. They had no need to become "Neo" anything.
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Neoconservatism ... originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' [After the end of the Cold War] ... many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center ... Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition. Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists.
By "change in values" you're clearly talking about the civil rights era stuff you probably have a hate-boner for. But the neo-cons weren't even against that. They were specifically against the USSR, and after the Democratic Party became dominated by anti-war leaders after years of anti-Vietnam protests, they left the party. They were "Neo" Conservatives specifically because they weren't actually conservative to start with, they were cosmopolitan liberal city-types but who supported especially Reagan because they were worried about the USSR.
Likewise neo-liberals had literally ZERO to do with the people that the USA calls "liberals".
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Neoliberalism (also neo-liberalism[1]) is a term used to signify the late 20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them
It wasn't from liberals, it was right-wingers bringing back pre 1930s lassei-faire capitalism ideas that used to be called "liberal". So it was "neo" because they were brushing off some disused century-old ideas.
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It was during those 1980s that Reagan put the two ideologies together, and they've been followed by every U.S. President since. From there, the U.S. continued two sets of policies that it had been employing earlier on:
- neoconservatism leading to using the military, onerous foreign policies, and covert actions to coerce, weaken, destabilize, and intervene in other countries in order to have regime change: governments that are friendly to the U.S.; and
Perhaps, except literally every time there's an actual invasion going on, it's one party doing it: The Republicans. The quote you give "US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011)" can be broken down to get at it.
Ok, firstly, why does he say "Serbia" there, when almost everyone just refers to that as the "Kosovo War"?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War)
Basically by omitting any mention of Kosovo it's easier to make some claim that the USA just randomly attacked Serbia, completely devoid of context. What in fact happened was the Kosovars had been fighting for independence for a while, and the Serbians cracked down and there were extra-judicial killings of sympathizers of the rebels. Then a European body sent peace-keepers in to try and maintain a cease-fire agreement. However, those peace-keepers then left the country, and the Serbs immediately launched a huge ethnic-cleansing campaign to drive ethnic Albanians out of the country.
It was only after this occurred that NATO got involved and used an aerial-bombardment campaign to try and drive back the Serbian forces. This worked, and they ended up back at the negotiating table within 2 months. Almost 500 people died in the bombings, which included Kosavar Albanians, but in the two years of fighting, the Serbians had murdered 13500 people. The intervention *saved lives*. And this is literally the worst thing they have on Bill Clinton.
As for Syria being an American "War of Choice" that's also preposterous. You've got multiple factions fighting there. Assad's Ba'athists, the Turks and the Turkish-aligned militias, Hezbollah and Iranian-back groups, pro-democracy Rebels, and ISIS. And I probably forgot some groups. It wasn't Barack Obama who made all this happen. If you blame any American, it's clearly Bush. The same for Libya. Also, the Russians are fighting in both countries too. So they aren't doing a war of choice, but of necessity I'd bet you'd say. Probably the reason your essay didn't mention American fighting in either Syria or Libya, but did mention Yemen, because that's the only one that doesn't also have Russian troops.
Also, both Libya and Syria aren't some plot the West did that came out of nowhere. They're part of the "Arab Spring" series of revolts that sprang up around the middle-east. Note that Tunisia and Egypt also fell to rebels at exactly the same time, but nobody claims the USA somehow plotted those in advance. The Arab Spring brought down equal numbers of pro and anti US governments, it wasn't targeted.
But also you can look at how the different blocs actually responded to their client states toppling. The USA under Obama totally COULD have violently propped up Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, but they declined to do so. Under your theory of how it all works, that's exactly what Obama's administration SHOULD have done. But they didn't do that. They let it go. The same with the fall of the pro-American dictator in Tunisia: Gone, and the Americans did not intervene. Meanwhile on the other hand you have Russians and Iranians propping up the doomed dictator Assad in Syria, no matter what, thus ensuring the civil war there never actually ends.
And then there's Libya. It's frankly not very realistic to claim that the whole civil war there was some type of planned regime-change thing imposed from outside. Firstly, it was part of the Arab Spring which spread to about 15 countries, indiscriminately of whether they were pro-American or anti-American. And like I said in my last post: if someone plans a coup, they already bribed people in the military to support it. You don't just encourage people to have protests and hope for the best.
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- neoliberalism through onerous economic policies like structural adjustment, if not military and financial aid with strings attached, for the same reason, and to pry open economies for exploitation of cheap resources (like oil) and labor.
... I guess that's exactly why North Korea is so wealthy and healthy and South Korea and Japan are languishing in poverty /s Yeah, capitalism is pretty exploitative, but economies have grown massively and infant mortality rates are coming down around the world.
As for this plan to use IMF spending, keep in mind that the biggest chunk of that actually comes from the USA.
Firstly, say they're using the loans to pressure nations to get cheap oil. How would that work? Oil-rich nations generally aren't the ones being bailed out by the IMF, for the simple fact that they have a lot of resources to sell. Also, the USA is the world's largest oil producer so driving down the world oil price would negatively affect US oil companies more than anyone else.
The same for other resources and even labor. If the goal is to open up those economies, then it would make them more competitive, but also more competitive vs the USA. And the issue is that some other country could just open up shop there just as easily, say China, and take advantage of the cheap labor and resources. Basically the same logic that you "got them" with the loan repayments would make it easier for China to manipulate them too.
Plus the big problem is that the initial loan spending drives up consumption, partly negating the effects of the austerity-to-follow, and that the austerity most drives down consumption, so their imports of American goods will drop too, but the benefits of any cheaper wages can be exploited by anyone else. So they could have literally just given that same money to their company in the first place.
while the IMF does suck for a lot of reasons, the "secret plot" that you outlined doesn't actually sound like a super-good "evil mastermind plan". Plus I'm not sure I've actually seen evidence of a US company rush to set up shop in nations that have recent IMF loans and austerity. Needing the loans, in the first place, means you weren't actually an appealing place for investors, so the belt-tightening isn't actually likely to "tip you over the line" of places that are actually attractive for investment.
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This was not difficult to consider given the fact that the U.S. has been engaged in warfare throughout much of its existence, and is considered even by some of its former Presidents as so. For example, Carter argued that the U.S. is the most warlike in modern history, and it was Eisenhower who warned about the military industrial complex, or collusion between business and the military.
Which is a legitimate thing to be concerned about, however it totally contradicts your other points, since anything war-related definitely seems to drive up the cost of resources, which is at odds with the logic of the IMF apparently trying to lower the cost of resources so that the USA can benefit. Companies can definitely benefit from these things, but it just doesn't make sense to say the USA uses the military and IMF to drive down the cost of oil, since those things are pretty much contrary to each other, and the USA probably benefits more from a high oil price than anyone else, since they make the most oil.
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Besides multiple attacks on various countries, and in several cases including NATO, the U.S. through Bush embarked on an empire-building scheme consisting of NATO expansion, with thirteen countries joining, and with the intent of transforming NATO from a shield into a sword, and start encircling Russia. The U.S. did this on a grander scale, with over 700 military bases and installations worldwide, including 400 used to encircle countries like China.
Why did it have to do this? That's where Sachs and other economists come in: in order to continue the borrowing and spending binge (the latter now leading to over $70 trillion in total debts and $170 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and debts that are impossible to pay back) the U.S. has to make sure that other countries remain in its orbit of dominance. And that includes taking down countries like Russia and China.
Covering the 70 trillion, that's is based on a GOP senator speaking, and the figure already included those "unfunded liabilities" in the total:
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https://web.archive.org/web/20170829052641/https://www.washingtonpost.com/web/20170829052641/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/04/18/is-the-real-number-for-the-national-debt-70-trillion/?utm_term=.23cc9a9e21a2)
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James Wegmann, a spokesman for Sasse, said he was drawing on several sources to come up with a ballpark figure. The Treasury Department, in a 2016 report, said that the projected expenditures for scheduled benefits for social insurance programs would exceed projected revenue by $46.7 trillion. Adding to it the gross debt of $19 trillion yields a figure of $66 trillion
So he just gave that figure, but rounded it up to $70 trillion. But ... he already counted the "unfunded liabilities" going out 75 years. It's the expected shortfall in tax revenues vs expenses if they DON'T fix the Medicare system. The Republicans have been blocking reforms for years now. This is a fixable problem, they don't even really need more money for it.
Very few sources give any reliable claim on something like $170 trillion but I found a few articles who saw that on a website (which was not sourced) and claimed it's probably something called an "infinite horizon" estimate - basically the Congressional Budget Office extrapolating as far as they can get to infinity-years into the future and how many payments would nee to be made. So we're talking *next century* for almost all of that extra $100 trillion.
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It's also kinda contradictory that they'd have to do this to stop the Ruble when the Euro is in fact a more credible threat to the US Dollar being the world currency. The Chinese Yuan is a credible competitor, but the Ruble is not.
So the whole "petrodollar" thing doesn't even make sense. America is a net oil *exporter*, not an importer, as it was in the 1970s, when Arabs were flush with cash from selling oil to the Americans. This is what "Petrodollars" actually meant. You can't just turn "Petrodollar" to mean anything you want, not now that America isn't even a big oil importer. People use the American dollar because America is just the biggest economy in the world, so the value of their currency isn't as volatile as currencies used by smaller economies.
Also, Russia's own unforced actions are totally behind the drive for NATO membership. How many joined after Russia's first, second war with Chechnya or their invasion of Georgia. Then, regardless of Bush and Iraq/Afghanistan, tell me how many non-Russia countries have had land wars with their neighbors since 1995?
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That's why the U.S. had to manipulate Ukraine for more than a decade, to ensure regime change and install corrupt Ukraine politicians, with the EU getting more access to cheap resources: the same neoliberal policies foisted on countries to ensure greater "freedoms" also makes them vulnerable to exploitation by more powerful countries, including the U.S. and members of the EU.
Oh yes it makes perfect sense. Especially when you consider that Russia and China were in the top-5 nations for Ukrainian trading partners, and the USA only clocked in at #12, and the UK at #16. /s
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https://www.worldstopexports.com/ukraines-top-15-import-partners/)
Also, after they recovered from the Euromaidan crisis, the ups and downs of Ukrainian GDP growth almost *perfectly* tracked with Russian GDP growth, and in general (other than when the Euromaidan happened) Ukraining GDP growth tracks super-closely to Russian GDP growth. (source: google Ukrainian GDP growth and check super-imposed line for Russia). So there's no real evidence of any special economic thing there that's not the regular economic conditions going on in the same region.
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But because most Americans who are decent would have not accepted such, media (also controlled by the rich, which controls 70 percent of the U.S. economy, funds both political parties, and owns the defense industry)
How many people is that, exactly? The top 1% hold 43% of all the wealth, the top 5% hold 86%. That's still pretty uneven, but basically everywhere is uneven. USA's Gini coefficient is 41, and China's is 38. There's not a lot of difference there.
70% of the wealth in America would be around 3% of the people, or 10 *million* Americans. So you're saying those 10 million Americans all conspire to control the media, the parties and own the defense industries? How nefarious of them /s
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had to continue the narrative stemming all the way from Reagan's "evil empire" speech on to Bush's "either you are with us, or you're with the terrorists", and argue that Russians, the Chinese, Iranians, etc., are all barbarians and savage, and that regime change must take place so that they will become civilized (i.e., promote U.S. ideals of liberal democracy and free markets), that the U.S. is the sole power that can achieve this (and with the help of its European lieutenants), and that if it does anything wrong, it's excused for the same reason (hence, American exceptionalism).
Just a fun side-note but it was communists who coined "American exceptionalism", and the context was that they claimed that the USA is "independent of the Marxist laws of history "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism)
And
"American exceptionalism has been a plank of the Republican party platform since 2012". Why only since 2012? Because Obama said in a speech he didn't believe in it, so naturally, the Republicans started making it a thing. There's actually not a lot of evidence that a doctrine of American Exceptionalism is some deep-seated facet of mainstream US political discourse. Yeah, the early Americans thought they were more "exceptional" than the Europeans because Europeans lived under monarchies and the USA was a democratic republic. In 1800, they had a pretty damn good point. You can fume against that if you like. And in the 1920s the American Communists coined the phrase "American Exceptionalism" to mean that Marx's historical materialism would play out differently in a prosperous republic without rigid class distinctions. they probably had a point too. It was only much later that the phrase got spread around that it's used by either major political party.
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And the public bought it. The result is what we see today: "I stand with Ukraine" but complete silence about Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, billions given to Ukraine (and likely with corrupt Ukraine and U.S. officials getting their cut) while the defense industry has a great time with higher sales, Zelensky dreaming of turning Ukraine into a bigger Israel, and the bewildering alliance of liberal hawks and MAGA supporters who unwittingly accept the public debt from military aid foisted upon them.
"And other places" you omit Syria and Libya, which are both convieniently also Arab Spring affected nations, but just happen to be the ones where there are also Russian troops.
monk on 29/12/2022 at 15:14
Quote Posted by Cipheron
Doing some basic fact-checking
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system)
Bretton Wood set a fixed price for the US dollar in terms of gold and was an exchange mechanism between a selected number of nations. Other nations weren't forced to be on that. It created exchange stability. So if you mean "dominated" by "had a stable currency" so people could trust US currency to maintain it's value, then yes, having a set exchange system made the US currency more desirable.
And you know what? having a locked in exchange rate makes you less competitive since it might not reflect the true underlying values of commodities and currencies. This creates a distortion that other actors who aren't you can then exploit to make a profit.
I'm not sure how this makes any sense. See what happened to the price of gold once Bretton Wood was abandoned: the price of gold shot through the roof. Bretton Woods was thus creating artificial upwards pressure on the currency values. They got rid of silver certificates in the 1960 for the same reason: silver was spiking in value due to increased manufacturing demand, so trying to peg the currency to silver wasn't viable.
Also the whole "Petrodollar" thing came about in the 1970s when the oil price shot through the roof and oil-exporters were suddenly flush with US dollars. It's literally nothing to do with the US dollar being a reserve currency any everything to do with the US being the biggest customer for oil exporters. This point doesn't make any sense, and it was the LOW value of the US dollar vs oil prices which caused the issue. And in fact, having lots of foreigners holding your dollars isn't exactly anti-growth. They're going to want to buy and invest with that money: invest in American stuff.
Except it didn't actually begin to "experience low economic growth starting in the early 1960s". Here's the US Bureau of Economic Analysis data:
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https://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year)
There was a big recession in 1946 clearly because of the end of the war spending. Then, shitty growth until 1950, and then one good year, and it tapered off again. It actually started to pick up in the 1960s and that's the first time you get good, sustained growth going forward. The 1960s were actually one of the strongest decades.
I got GPT to split this by 5 year averages:
1945-1949: 3.69%
1950-1954: 3.82%
1955-1959: 4.68%
1960-1964: 3.47%
1965-1969: 5.86%
1970-1974: 2.67%
1975-1979: 3.59%
1980-1984: 2.77%
1985-1989: 3.47%
1990-1994: 2.77%
1995-1999: 3.61%
2000-2004: 3.19%
2005-2009: 2.82%
2010-2014: 2.38%
2015-2019: 2.24%
There hasn't been much of a decline at all. There are still 5-year spans such as 1995-1999 where growth was as good as the post-WWII period. Note the distinct lack of any specific decline which started in the early 1960s. Sure that 5-year patch was a bit weaker than the late 1950s, but then the *late* 1960s was even better.
Why would you misplace a decline in the 1960s? Is it because you're on a "decadent western values" kick, so you want to paint the "decline" as starting at the same time as the civil rights era and the counter-culture?
As for the drop in real wages, well that did peak in 1973 and declined a fair bit by the end of the 70s. However ... if you look at figures for median *household* income, those actually increased from 1973-1979. Sources:
(
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-in-one-chart/)
(
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N)
These are both inflation-adjusted. if you only look at the first chart it looks like people are getting poorer, but in the second chart, the typical *household* was in fact getting richer during the same time-period. How to reconcile these two data points? Keep in mind that a LOT of new people were entering the workforce in the 1970s - women. So the error was treating this as a zero-sum game and as atomic individuals, when in fact people are organized into economic units called "families" so to work out how people are doing, looking at families and not individuals is the correct data. More women entered the workforce, and this was on the whole, good for families. But more labor supply did in fact put downward pressure on individual wages.
America is a rich country, that's their strength. While people rightly bemoan wealth inequality, the idea that everyone in America is constantly getting worse off in every way, it turns out, isn't *quite* in line with reality. If that was actually the case then it wouldn't have in fact stayed a superpower for very long.
This whole bit is confused. Firstly, why would it make sense for Conservatives to twist themselves into "Neo-Conservatives" due to some "change in values" among leftists. Conservatives were Conservatives before the civil-right eras, and they were Conservatives AFTER the civil-rights era. They had no need to become "Neo" anything.
By "change in values" you're clearly talking about the civil rights era stuff you probably have a hate-boner for. But the neo-cons weren't even against that. They were specifically against the USSR, and after the Democratic Party became dominated by anti-war leaders after years of anti-Vietnam protests, they left the party. They were "Neo" Conservatives specifically because they weren't actually conservative to start with, they were cosmopolitan liberal city-types but who supported especially Reagan because they were worried about the USSR.
Likewise neo-liberals had literally ZERO to do with the people that the USA calls "liberals".
It wasn't from liberals, it was right-wingers bringing back pre 1930s lassei-faire capitalism ideas that used to be called "liberal". So it was "neo" because they were brushing off some disused century-old ideas.
Perhaps, except literally every time there's an actual invasion going on, it's one party doing it: The Republicans. The quote you give "US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011)" can be broken down to get at it.
Ok, firstly, why does he say "Serbia" there, when almost everyone just refers to that as the "Kosovo War"?
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War)
Basically by omitting any mention of Kosovo it's easier to make some claim that the USA just randomly attacked Serbia, completely devoid of context. What in fact happened was the Kosovars had been fighting for independence for a while, and the Serbians cracked down and there were extra-judicial killings of sympathizers of the rebels. Then a European body sent peace-keepers in to try and maintain a cease-fire agreement. However, those peace-keepers then left the country, and the Serbs immediately launched a huge ethnic-cleansing campaign to drive ethnic Albanians out of the country.
It was only after this occurred that NATO got involved and used an aerial-bombardment campaign to try and drive back the Serbian forces. This worked, and they ended up back at the negotiating table within 2 months. Almost 500 people died in the bombings, which included Kosavar Albanians, but in the two years of fighting, the Serbians had murdered 13500 people. The intervention *saved lives*. And this is literally the worst thing they have on Bill Clinton.
As for Syria being an American "War of Choice" that's also preposterous. You've got multiple factions fighting there. Assad's Ba'athists, the Turks and the Turkish-aligned militias, Hezbollah and Iranian-back groups, pro-democracy Rebels, and ISIS. And I probably forgot some groups. It wasn't Barack Obama who made all this happen. If you blame any American, it's clearly Bush. The same for Libya. Also, the Russians are fighting in both countries too. So they aren't doing a war of choice, but of necessity I'd bet you'd say. Probably the reason your essay didn't mention American fighting in either Syria or Libya, but did mention Yemen, because that's the only one that doesn't also have Russian troops.
Also, both Libya and Syria aren't some plot the West did that came out of nowhere. They're part of the "Arab Spring" series of revolts that sprang up around the middle-east. Note that Tunisia and Egypt also fell to rebels at exactly the same time, but nobody claims the USA somehow plotted those in advance. The Arab Spring brought down equal numbers of pro and anti US governments, it wasn't targeted.
But also you can look at how the different blocs actually responded to their client states toppling. The USA under Obama totally COULD have violently propped up Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, but they declined to do so. Under your theory of how it all works, that's exactly what Obama's administration SHOULD have done. But they didn't do that. They let it go. The same with the fall of the pro-American dictator in Tunisia: Gone, and the Americans did not intervene. Meanwhile on the other hand you have Russians and Iranians propping up the doomed dictator Assad in Syria, no matter what, thus ensuring the civil war there never actually ends.
And then there's Libya. It's frankly not very realistic to claim that the whole civil war there was some type of planned regime-change thing imposed from outside. Firstly, it was part of the Arab Spring which spread to about 15 countries, indiscriminately of whether they were pro-American or anti-American. And like I said in my last post: if someone plans a coup, they already bribed people in the military to support it. You don't just encourage people to have protests and hope for the best.
... I guess that's exactly why North Korea is so wealthy and healthy and South Korea and Japan are languishing in poverty /s Yeah, capitalism is pretty exploitative, but economies have grown massively and infant mortality rates are coming down around the world.
As for this plan to use IMF spending, keep in mind that the biggest chunk of that actually comes from the USA.
Firstly, say they're using the loans to pressure nations to get cheap oil. How would that work? Oil-rich nations generally aren't the ones being bailed out by the IMF, for the simple fact that they have a lot of resources to sell. Also, the USA is the world's largest oil producer so driving down the world oil price would negatively affect US oil companies more than anyone else.
The same for other resources and even labor. If the goal is to open up those economies, then it would make them more competitive, but also more competitive vs the USA. And the issue is that some other country could just open up shop there just as easily, say China, and take advantage of the cheap labor and resources. Basically the same logic that you "got them" with the loan repayments would make it easier for China to manipulate them too.
Plus the big problem is that the initial loan spending drives up consumption, partly negating the effects of the austerity-to-follow, and that the austerity most drives down consumption, so their imports of American goods will drop too, but the benefits of any cheaper wages can be exploited by anyone else. So they could have literally just given that same money to their company in the first place.
while the IMF does suck for a lot of reasons, the "secret plot" that you outlined doesn't actually sound like a super-good "evil mastermind plan". Plus I'm not sure I've actually seen evidence of a US company rush to set up shop in nations that have recent IMF loans and austerity. Needing the loans, in the first place, means you weren't actually an appealing place for investors, so the belt-tightening isn't actually likely to "tip you over the line" of places that are actually attractive for investment.
Which is a legitimate thing to be concerned about, however it totally contradicts your other points, since anything war-related definitely seems to drive up the cost of resources, which is at odds with the logic of the IMF apparently trying to lower the cost of resources so that the USA can benefit. Companies can definitely benefit from these things, but it just doesn't make sense to say the USA uses the military and IMF to drive down the cost of oil, since those things are pretty much contrary to each other, and the USA probably benefits more from a high oil price than anyone else, since they make the most oil.
Covering the 70 trillion, that's is based on a GOP senator speaking, and the figure already included those "unfunded liabilities" in the total:
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https://web.archive.org/web/20170829052641/https://www.washingtonpost.com/web/20170829052641/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/04/18/is-the-real-number-for-the-national-debt-70-trillion/?utm_term=.23cc9a9e21a2)
So he just gave that figure, but rounded it up to $70 trillion. But ... he already counted the "unfunded liabilities" going out 75 years. It's the expected shortfall in tax revenues vs expenses if they DON'T fix the Medicare system. The Republicans have been blocking reforms for years now. This is a fixable problem, they don't even really need more money for it.
Very few sources give any reliable claim on something like $170 trillion but I found a few articles who saw that on a website (which was not sourced) and claimed it's probably something called an "infinite horizon" estimate - basically the Congressional Budget Office extrapolating as far as they can get to infinity-years into the future and how many payments would nee to be made. So we're talking *next century* for almost all of that extra $100 trillion.
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It's also kinda contradictory that they'd have to do this to stop the Ruble when the Euro is in fact a more credible threat to the US Dollar being the world currency. The Chinese Yuan is a credible competitor, but the Ruble is not.
So the whole "petrodollar" thing doesn't even make sense. America is a net oil *exporter*, not an importer, as it was in the 1970s, when Arabs were flush with cash from selling oil to the Americans. This is what "Petrodollars" actually meant. You can't just turn "Petrodollar" to mean anything you want, not now that America isn't even a big oil importer. People use the American dollar because America is just the biggest economy in the world, so the value of their currency isn't as volatile as currencies used by smaller economies.
Also, Russia's own unforced actions are totally behind the drive for NATO membership. How many joined after Russia's first, second war with Chechnya or their invasion of Georgia. Then, regardless of Bush and Iraq/Afghanistan, tell me how many non-Russia countries have had land wars with their neighbors since 1995?
Oh yes it makes perfect sense. Especially when you consider that Russia and China were in the top-5 nations for Ukrainian trading partners, and the USA only clocked in at #12, and the UK at #16. /s
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https://www.worldstopexports.com/ukraines-top-15-import-partners/)
Also, after they recovered from the Euromaidan crisis, the ups and downs of Ukrainian GDP growth almost *perfectly* tracked with Russian GDP growth, and in general (other than when the Euromaidan happened) Ukraining GDP growth tracks super-closely to Russian GDP growth. (source: google Ukrainian GDP growth and check super-imposed line for Russia). So there's no real evidence of any special economic thing there that's not the regular economic conditions going on in the same region.
How many people is that, exactly? The top 1% hold 43% of all the wealth, the top 5% hold 86%. That's still pretty uneven, but basically everywhere is uneven. USA's Gini coefficient is 41, and China's is 38. There's not a lot of difference there.
70% of the wealth in America would be around 3% of the people, or 10 *million* Americans. So you're saying those 10 million Americans all conspire to control the media, the parties and own the defense industries? How nefarious of them /s
Just a fun side-note but it was communists who coined "American exceptionalism", and the context was that they claimed that the USA is "independent of the Marxist laws of history "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism)
And
"American exceptionalism has been a plank of the Republican party platform since 2012". Why only since 2012? Because Obama said in a speech he didn't believe in it, so naturally, the Republicans started making it a thing. There's actually not a lot of evidence that a doctrine of American Exceptionalism is some deep-seated facet of mainstream US political discourse. Yeah, the early Americans thought they were more "exceptional" than the Europeans because Europeans lived under monarchies and the USA was a democratic republic. In 1800, they had a pretty damn good point. You can fume against that if you like. And in the 1920s the American Communists coined the phrase "American Exceptionalism" to mean that Marx's historical materialism would play out differently in a prosperous republic without rigid class distinctions. they probably had a point too. It was only much later that the phrase got spread around that it's used by either major political party.
"And other places" you omit Syria and Libya, which are both convieniently also Arab Spring affected nations, but just happen to be the ones where there are also Russian troops.
Bretton Woods led to the use of the dollar as a global reserve currency, then the petrodollar, and then the Triffin dilemma for the U.S. That's why it embarked on neocon/neolib policies via Ray-gun, and followed through by subsequent U.S. Presidents.
The petrodollar did not appear accidentally. LOL. It involved a deal between Nixon and the House of Saud, where oil would be priced in dollars and Saudi profits invested in Wall Street in exchange for military aid to counter the Israelis, which the U.S. was also arming! Gives new meaning to the idea of war being a racket.
That's high economic growth for you? You must be joking.
You forgot to talk about real wages dropping after 1970, chronic trade deficits, and heavy borrowing and spending binge from 1982 onward.
Of course the U.S. is a rich country: rich in debt. What is it now? Something like $70 trillion in total debts plus $170 trillion in unfunded liabilties? Which magnificent genius can you name who will argue that the U.S. will be able to pay off even part of that debt without borrowing more?
Neo-libs have nothing to do with liberals? You must be joking. They came from liberal hawks disillusioned by the rise of "tyranny" worldwide? Why do you think the same, including Creepy Joe, keeps calling for regime change for Russia? Heck, even the leftists criticize Bernie and AOC for doing similar!
Meanwhile, why does Zelensky insist on privatizing? Why is he making deals with Blackrock? The U.S. grift is showing:
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https://jacobin.com/2022/07/ukraine-neoliberalism-war-russia-eu-imf)
Only the Republicans are warmongers? LOL.
(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dhev2W4STU)
(
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-calling-regime-change-russia-this-time-it-isnt-gaffe-1694867)
(
https://harvardpolitics.com/obama-war-criminal/)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU)
I won't bother with the excuses you give concerning Libya and others, as they are nothing more than what neocon/neolibs give to justify U.S. exceptionalism, among others. They also explain why you and others have a blinkered view of what's happening to Ukraine. You simply need to maintain the narrative of U.S. good - Russia (or China, or Iran, or _____) bad, with the addition that it's only the Republicans who are in on it. Creepy Joe, Barry, and others are innocent lambs.
