Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been a foreign correspondent for The New York Times for 15 years, recently published an article "Democrats, the More Effective Evil" on ScheerPost and on some small western newspapers like Consortium News. The American Democratic Party and American politics. The United States is a de facto one-party state, he argues, where national security is sacrosanct, unsustainable debt builds empires, and business is war.
DARK PICTURE OF AMERICA
In the article he denounced the failure of the Democratic Party to be unable to stop the 7.5% inflation rate, reneging on promises to raise the minimum wage or forgive student debt in the face of Republican objections and ignorance. how to deal with a pandemic that has claimed the lives of 900,000 people - 16% of all deaths in the world even though the US has less than 5% of the world's population…. Democrats are trying to "create existential threats" such as terrorism, against Russia, China and expanding state power in the name of national security, seeing war as an antidote to redirecting public attention away from government corruption and incompetence.
America, burdened by de facto tax boycotts by the rich and corporations, is deeply in debt, the highest in our history. The US government budget deficit was $2.77 trillion for the 2021 budget year ending September 30, the second-highest annual deficit on record. It just exceeds the $3.13 trillion deficit for 2020.
The total national debt of the United States is more than $30 trillion. Household debt increased by $1 trillion last year. The total outstanding balance in the US government's Ponzi scheme is now $1.4 trillion more than it was at the end of 2019. America's wars are waged with borrowed money. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that interest payments on military debt could amount to more than $6.5 trillion by the 2050s. None of this debt is sustainable.
At the same time, the United States is facing the growth spurt of China, where its economy is predicted to surpass that of the US by the end of the decade .
Interest rates were so cheap that corporations and banks had to borrow in droves from the Federal Reserve, often with missing papers and bad investments. As a result, American businesses are more heavily indebted than at any point in American history. Add to that increased inflation, caused by businesses that have raised prices in a desperate attempt to make up for lost revenue due to supply chain shortages and rising transportation costs, the economic downturn, and rising wages. mildly caused by the pandemic. This inflation forced the Fed to cut the growth rate of the money supply and raise interest rates, which then pushed corporations to raise prices even further.
Desperate measures to avert an economic crisis are self-defeating. Mass defaults on mortgages, student loans, credit cards, household debt, car debt, and other loans in the United States are probably inevitable. With no short-term mechanism to document the disaster, it leads to prolonged depression.
An economic crisis will lead to a political crisis. And a political crisis is traditionally resolved by war against enemies inside and outside the nation. ..
LINE CONFLICT WITH RUSSIA, CHINA, UKRAINE WAR TO SAVE THE SITUATION?
Biden's rhetoric toward China and Russia in particular, is tougher than that of the Trump administration, accompanied by the formation of new security alliances such as those with India, Japan, Australia and Britain in Indo-Pacific.
Ironically, the aggressive action of the United States pushed China and Russia into a forced marriage, something that the creators of the Cold War, including Nixon and Kissinger, when they opened the door to China States in 1971, tried very hard to avoid. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, after their recent meeting in Beijing, issued a 5,300-word statement condemning NATO's expansion in Eastern Europe, denouncing the formation of blocs security in the Asia Pacific region and criticized the AUKUS tripartite security treaty between the United States, Great Britain and Australia. They also vowed to prevent "color revolutions" and strengthen "resistance" strategic coordination.
The fervor of the Democratic Party has always been wrapped in the mantle of democracy, freedom and human rights, making the Democrats more effective "salesmen" for war. Democrats eagerly lined up behind George W. Bush in calls to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of "humanitarian intervention" and "liberation" of Afghan women, who would spend two decades Next live in terror, bury family members, at times their children.
Even as Democrats, including Barack Obama, criticized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while running for office, they steadfastly voted to fund the wars to “support our military.” me” after being elected. Now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), says "an attack on Ukraine is an attack on democracy," the same argument Democrats clung to half a century ago. launched and expanded the disastrous war in Vietnam.
Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is currently drafting legislation that he proudly calls "the mother of all sanctions bills." The bill, led by Gregory Meeks of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also a Democrat, in the House of Representatives, requires the administration "not to give in to the requests of the Russian Federation to expand or become a member of the Russian Federation." NATO member".
NATO's expansion into Ukraine along Russia's borders is a central issue for Moscow. Leaving this up for discussion would preclude a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Sanctions under the law can be imposed on any act, no matter how small, that Ukraine considers hostile. Sanctions cannot be lifted until an agreement is reached between the Ukrainian and Russian governments, meaning Ukraine will be granted the power to determine when US sanctions will end.
The proposed sanctions target Russian banks, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, state-owned enterprises and top members of the government and military, including President Vladimir Putin, also called for keeping Russia out of SWIFT, the international financial trading system that uses the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency.
“The act would grant at least $500 million in foreign military assistance to Ukraine, in addition to $200 million in new assistance sent in the last month,” writes Marcus Stanley . This makes Ukraine the top recipient of US military aid globally, after Israel and Egypt. While this would not come close to giving Ukraine the ability to fend off Russia on its own, the inclusion of American military advisers would likely increase the risk of the United States being drawn into a conflict. The bill also takes steps to directly involve countries bordering Russia into negotiations aimed at ending the crisis, which would make reaching an agreement much more difficult.
While cutting off Russia from SWIFT would be a disaster, at least in the short term, for the Russian economy, pushing Russia into China's arms to create an alternative global financial system is no longer viable. dependence on the US dollar would cripple the American empire. Once the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, the dollar will depreciate rapidly, perhaps by two-thirds, just as the pound did when the British currency was abandoned as a currency. world reserve currency in the 1950s.
Treasury bonds, used to finance the US military-based balance of payments deficits and growing government budget deficits, will no longer be attractive investments for countries like China. With nearly 800 US military outposts abroad, the debt burden - the Chinese have lent an estimated $1 trillion to the US to earn huge profits - will be significantly reduced in number. Meanwhile, massive US interest payments will, at least in part, continue to fund the Chinese military.
The dominance of the United States over the world economy, after 75 years, is over. It won't come back. We produce few, lack of weapons. Our economy is an illusion built on unsustainable levels of debt. The looting run by elites and capitalist conglomerates has decimated the country from within, rotted its infrastructure, crippled democratic institutions, and at least half the population. struggling to make ends meet.
The two ruling parties, puppets for the ruling oligarch, refuse to rein in the raw desires of the war industry and the rich, hastening the crisis. …To fill it, the Biden administration is targeting Trump supporters and winning harsh sentences for those who stormed Capital Hill. On January 6, the Biden Justice Department set up a counterterrorism unit. domestic propaganda to focus on extremists, and Democrats have been behind a series of moves to remove the platform and censor their right-wing critics.
According to Samuel Johnson, controversies with Republicans are largely political theater, often revolving around absurd or trivial things. On substantive matters, there is no difference in the ruling class. Democrats, like Republicans, embrace the illusion that, even as the country was teetering on the brink of default, a war industry had its aftermath, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, will restore America's lost global hegemony.
Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, ultimately "destroy themselves in an attempt to prove themselves indestructible". The self-delusion of the military's invincibility is the scourge that has befallen the American empire, as it has brought down the empires of the past.
We are living in a one-party state. The ideology of national security is sacrosanct. The cult of secrecy, justified in the name of protecting us from our enemies, is a smokescreen to conceal from the public the inner workings of power and manipulate public perception. The Democratic courts and advisers surround any Democratic presidential candidate — retired generals and diplomats, former national security advisers, Wall Street economists. , lobbyists and bureaucrats from previous administrations - did not want to limit the powers of the imperial president.
See the full article at the link https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/15/chris-hedges-democrats-the-more-effective-evil/
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