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Home » xyzzy » Dungeon » Modern Monetary Theory (or, how I stopped worrying about the natl debt.)
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| Re: Modern Monetary Theory [message #98011 is a reply to message #98001] |
Tue, 17 September 2024 07:21   |
Rusty
Messages: 1187
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
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Illuminati (3rd Degree) |
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Richard Wolff:
The Decline of the U.S. Empire: Where Is It Taking Us All?
Richard Wolff
posted by Richard Wolff | 14154pt
September 13, 2024
The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire--and that once did--now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating. In empires' early years, leaders and the led may repress those among them who stress or merely even mention decline. Social problems may likewise be denied, minimized, or, if admitted, blamed on convenient scapegoats--immigrants, foreign powers, or ethnic minorities--rather than linked to imperial decline.
The U.S. empire, audaciously proclaimed by the Monroe Doctrine soon after two independence wars won against Britain, grew across the 19th and 20th centuries, and peaked during the decades between 1945 and 2010. The rise of the U.S. empire overlapped with the decline of the British empire. The Soviet Union represented limited political and military challenges, but never any serious economic competition or threat. The Cold War was a lopsided contest whose outcome was programmed in from its beginning. All of the U.S. empire's potential economic competitors or threats were devastated by World War II. The following years found Europe losing its colonies. The unique global position of the United States then, with its disproportional position in world trade and investment, was anomalous and likely unsustainable. An attitude of denial at the time that decline was all but certain morphed only too readily into the attitude of denial now that the decline is well underway.
The United States could not prevail militarily over all of Korea in its 195053 war there. The United States lost its subsequent wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The NATO alliance was insufficient to alter any of those outcomes. U.S. military and financial support for Ukraine and the massive United States and NATO sanctions war against Russia are failures to date and are likely to remain so. U.S. sanctions programs against Cuba, Iran, and China have failed too. Meanwhile, the BRICS alliance counteracts U.S. policies to protect its empire, including its sanctions warfare, with increasing effectiveness.
In the realms of trade, investment, and finance, we can measure the decline of the U.S. empire differently. One index is the decline of the U.S. dollar as a central bank reserve holding. Another is its decline as a means of trade, loans, and investment. Finally, consider the U.S. dollar's decline alongside that of dollar-denominated assets as internationally desired means of holding wealth. Across the Global South, countries, industries, or firms seeking trade, loans, or investments used to go to London, Washington, or Paris for decades; they now have other options. They can go instead to Beijing, New Delhi, or Moscow, where they often secure more attractive terms.
Empire confers special advantages that translate into extraordinary profits for firms located in the country that dominates the empire. The 19th century was remarkable for its endless confrontations and struggles among empires competing for territory to dominate and thus for their industries' higher profits. Declines of any one empire could enhance opportunities for competing empires. If the latter grabbed those opportunities, the former's decline could worsen. One set of competing empires delivered two world wars in the last century. Another set seems increasingly driven to deliver worse, possibly nuclear world wars in this century.
Before World War I, theories circulated that the evolution of multinational corporations out of merely national mega-corporations would end or reduce the risks of war. Owners and directors of increasingly global corporations would work against war among countries as a logical extension of their profit-maximizing strategies. The century's two world wars undermined those theories' appearance of truth. So too did the fact that multinational mega-corporations increasingly purchased governments and subordinated state policies to those corporations' competing growth strategies. Capitalists' competition governed state policies at least as much as the reverse. Out of their interaction emerged the wars of the 21st century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. Likewise from their interaction, rising U.S.-China tensions emerged around Taiwan and the South China Sea.
China presents a unique analytical problem. The private capitalist half of its hybrid economic system exhibits growth imperatives parallel to those agitating economies where 90100 percent of enterprises are private capitalist in organization. The state-owned-and-operated enterprises comprising the other half of China's economy exhibit different drives and motivations. Profit is less their bottom line than it is for private capitalist enterprises. Similarly, the Communist Party's rule over the state--including the state's regulation of the entire Chinese economy--introduces other objectives besides profit, ones that also govern enterprise decisions. Since China and its major economic allies (BRICS) comprise the entity now competing with the declining U.S. empire and its major economic allies (G7), China's uniqueness may yield an outcome different from past clashes of empires.
In the past, one empire often supplanted another. That may be our future with this century becoming "China's" as previous empires were American, British, and so on. However, China's history includes earlier empires that rose and fell: another unique quality. Might China's past and its present hybrid economy influence China away from becoming another empire and rather toward a genuinely multipolar global organization instead? Might the dreams and hopes behind the League of Nations and the United Nations achieve reality if and when China makes that happen? Or will China become the next global hegemon against heightened resistance from the United States, bringing the risk of nuclear war closer?
A rough historical parallel may shed some additional light from a different angle on where today's class of empires may lead. The movement toward independence of its North American colony irritated Britain sufficiently for it to attempt two wars (177583 and 181215) to stop that movement. Both wars failed. Britain learned the valuable lesson that peaceful co-existence with some co-respective planning and accommodation would enable both economies to function and grow, including in trade and investment both ways across their borders. That peaceful co-existence extended to allowing the imperial reach of the one to give way to that of the other.
Why not suggest a similar trajectory for U.S.-China relations over the next generation? Except for ideologues detached from reality, the world would prefer it over the nuclear alternative. Dealing with the two massive, unwanted consequences of capitalism--climate change and unequal distributions of wealth and income--offers projects for a U.S.-China partnership that the world will applaud. Capitalism changed dramatically in both Britain and the United States after 1815. It will likely do so again after 2025. The opportunities are attractively open-ended.
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| Re: Modern Monetary Theory [message #98046 is a reply to message #98011] |
Sun, 13 October 2024 12:09 |
Rusty
Messages: 1187
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
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Illuminati (3rd Degree) |
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An excellent discourse broaching several issues in our world right now. Ukraine, Israel and how our capitalist system is maintained. Counter productively to what long term issues the world is facing.
An excerpt midway in the transcription of Wolff and Hudson on the show Dialogue Works. Hosted by Nima Alkhorshid. Both these two senior economists have given glimpses of how our country and the worlds economic and geopolitical positioning are being played out. The motivations and reactions. Its fascinating to get their perspective. As you will not be able to glean much from our entrenched corporate media to give anything more than a homogenized version of world and public affairs.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let me come at this from a slightly different perspective that might be of interest to folks. Capitalism as a system has built into its structure an imperative to grow. Every capitalist understands that unless they can expand their business and thereby get their hands on bigger profits, they run the risk of being competed out of existence by somebody who can and will do that. And so they all have to grow. And we know that this has become internalized by the political leaders of all capitalist countries.
I'll use the example that they teach in elementary school: If an economy is like a pie, and different people and different groups have different pieces, if you grow the pie, everybody's piece can get bigger and we will all be happy.
If you don't grow the pie, then a growth in some requires a diminution in the others and then we will be at each other's throats. Very old idea, been around for centuries.
And in capitalism, that idea, together with the way capitalism works, means that countries with employers and employees and enterprises that produce and compete in markets have a drive to grow. That's why it's a national emergency if the statistics show the GDP isn't growing fast enough. Oh my god, alarm, alarm.
Okay, now let's stop and take a step back. For ecological reasons and climate change reasons, we now know we've got to stop growing it's threatening our survival. The people of the world have already figured it out because the birth rate of our planet is now zero. We're not growing anymore. The United States, Asia. Only in Africa is there a net positive birth rate, and it's shrinking there too. Okay, now we have a problem that a long-repressed part of the world, the global south, wants to have its standard of living be where it should have been two centuries ago. They're not waiting anymore. So they are demanding a bigger piece of the pie. This, of course, threatens the United States because it can't grow the way it wants to because it now has a serious competitor. China and the BRICS is already a richer entity than the United States and the G7. Okay, here's then a solution. We question don't everybody yell we question capitalism. Why don't we change to a system that doesn't have a built-in imperative to grow, because it's killing us? It's killing us ecologically, but it's also killing us because the genuine and deserved demand of the global south for a place in the sun to raise their families, have an education, be decently cared for, medically and so on, is not going to be stopped with or without a world war. All right, so let's accommodate: Give them a bigger piece and rearrange in the way that socialists have always advocated to a much less unequal distribution of the resources of the world. That way we can stop growing, thereby meet our ecological danger and do away with the competition that threatens a war between a rising standard of living in the global south and a resharing that the rest of us here in the global north will have to undergo. But we do so because it saves our planet, and it saves us from war, and that's worth it.
That's a plan, but it requires the taboo be broken. Employer-employee is not the only way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services. It's the capitalist way. It was what we got when we got rid of the lords and serfs, and masters and slaves we replaced it with employers and employees. But we can do better than that and we are at a point where we have to. And so the issue of a socialism beyond capitalism comes right back on the agenda. It never really left, it just needs a little goosing from those of us who see it to make it become, again, what we're all talking about and struggling to figure out how to achieve.
MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard described is occurring on a number of planes. He talks about the drive of capitalism is to grow. Well, that's certainly the dynamic of industrial capitalism, but somehow that hasn't been the drive of the United States recently. Richard, how do you grow by out competing your rivals? You cut costs, you make things cheaper, or less expensively, and better. But the United States has been losing its race. It's true. Last month the US GDP is going to grow and next month it's going to really grow because the hurricanes hit South Carolina and now they're going to hit Florida. That's going to be a big jump in GDP. It's not going to increase America's dominance or competitiveness.
The American idea of growing today I think certainly the neo-con idea, the Democratic and Republican idea isn't the kind of growth Richard is talking about capitalism. It's a purely exploitative growth: America can only grow by arranging the international economic order in a way that siphons off the real growth in other countries China, Russia, the global south and taking their economic surplus and transferring it to itself.
This is not a growth of part of the production sector of the economy. It's a growth of the circulation sector of the economy. Marx drew those two distinctions production, circulation, which is part of the distribution. The American growth has been parasitic. The NATO-U.S. unity is like a parasite on the body of the global majority and they call that growth for the United States in Europe, but it's parasitism. All of that, as Richard just said, we're facing the overhead of global warming. How do you prevent it? Well, China has taken the lead according to yesterday's Wall Street Journal in cutting way back carbon emissions, way back coal, and by taking the lead and creating solar power and atomic power. The U.S. position is to oppose the importation of Chinese solar panels because that's not their philosophy. The oil lobbyists are now backing both political parties in the United States to make sure that any agreements like the Paris Agreement that America signed will not be followed in practice.
You have the United States and Europe pushing the growth and pollution. You have the green party in Germany saying that coal is the fuel of the future. It's coal and cutting down the forests. It's not oil, it's not gas, it's not power. It's simply that. And you achieve this global fix-up by war.
Somehow the anti-war party is supposed to be a key precondition catalyst for all of this environmental change. You're having this bizarre conflation of ideas in the U.S.- NATO, as opposed to the rest of the world, just as Richard has pointed out.
These two economists consistently point out the flaws in our system that are ignored and or denigrated as too radical. But as we all know intuitively in our lives is that the way things are, either aren't working or working against us. Its both of course. At least we have some outlet that can counter the mind numbing narrative we're fed.
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| Re: Modern Monetary Theory [message #98048 is a reply to message #98046] |
Mon, 14 October 2024 10:07 |
Rusty
Messages: 1187
Registered: May 2018
Location: Kansas City Missouri
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Illuminati (3rd Degree) |
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When economists such as Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff speak of our country's predatory and parasitic practices upon our own public. Take heed. It's been going on for some time. In the medical field, (which I experienced), private equity has been ravaging rural and small hospitals, private clinics and doctor's groups by driving up the medical costs that were already too expensive. Now I read that the trades. Plumbing, electrical etc. are succumbing to being bought up by these private equity parasites to make easy money out of the people that work under their tyranny and the public that has to shell out more and more for their service.
This is the twilight of our capitalist neoliberal system. To be feeding on the very public it needs for its benefit. Inspiring a book years ago called Killing The Host that the author Michael Hudson explained this parasitic aspect of our economy. Apparently its finding more and more avenues towards making our cost of living to make us all bankrupt eventually. All while our government is obsessed with maintaining appearances globally as some purveyor of freedom and democracy which entitles our country to dominate others by sanctioning and proxy war mongering.
Wolff and Hudson remark about our 'empire' showing signs of failure. Which like all prior empires this world has had tend to historically be devoured from within. Private equity sure seems to fit that category
https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2024/10/13/private-equity-wants-to-unclog-your-toilet
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