CHINA

PETER KOENIG—Did Mr. Macron and his European counterparts just see the light? Did he realize that being the king of vassal Europe is really meaningless and that it’s high time to jump the sinking boat? Only the near future will tell.Another scenario is that China has long realized the self-liquidating nature of the EU, and instead of banking their trade agreements with a potentially dead body, they approach trade deals country by country: Greece, Italy, France, Germany – who is next? – Because, even with the collapse of the European Union, the 28 countries must and will survive. So, trade agreements with each one of them individually have an indefinitely higher value, than signing up with a block of unsolidary, uncoordinated, even in some cases hostile-to-each-other nations – with a fiat currency that is doomed, as it will never survive in such a non-union constellation – without even a Constitution pointing to a common vision.

RAMIN MAZAHERI—Most Westerners are as uninterested in China’s CR as they are in their own rural areas. I am certain this is true, because as a journalist I am 100% aware of my field’s failures in reporting on, from, or about rural areas. What’s worse, Western journalism has exacerbated their urban-rural divide by reporting from a starting point that rural areas are not morally equal to urban areas. This is a major shift from previous times: for example, during the US Revolution the farmer-citizen was Thomas Jefferson’s ideal man, and their Electoral College was created in part to ensure rural voices are not drowned out by city-slickers.

CALEB MAUPIN—Their argument is this: capitalism is better because the refrigerator possessed by the average American family is better than the refrigerator possessed by the average Cuban family.However, anyone who has ever been to Latin America knows this argument is completely bunk. All throughout the region in places where free market capitalism reigns, there are millions and millions of people who do not have running water or electricity. Millions of Haitians, who live under US free market capitalism and in some cases eat dirt mixed with oil, have no refrigerator at all. In the jungles and mountains of Peru, Guatemala, and Honduras, there are millions of people who have never seen a flushing toilet in their lives, let alone a fully functioning refrigerator.

PETER KOENIG—The big danger for the US-driven western criminal monetary and debt-driven pyramid system, is China, because China’s economy is based on hard economic output, construction, manufacturing, intellectual and scientific development, as compared to the US-driven western neoliberal profit-maximizing dogma with inflated services, one that outsources hard production to low-wage countries, foregoes long-term economic gains and institutional memory, for a GDP of hot air, McDonalds-type jobs, consumption of cheap and useless imports; and, of course, – a destructive war and killing industry.