PATRICK LAWRENCE—There is no need to wonder what causes this departure from observable facts, diabolically purposeful as it often is, and what comes of it. This may seem an unprecedented moment in human history, but there are, indeed, many precedents. Barbara Tuchman told us all about them in The March of Folly (Knopf, 1984): These grand lapses reflect an absence of intellect, vision, and principle at leadership level and lead ineluctably to failure and one or another kind of mess. The Ukraine case, the preoccupation in Munich last week, could not possibly make this clearer.
GLOBAL NEOLIBERALISM
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INDRAJIT—To the north, America has already lost to Russia. To their south, they’re facing their own uncompleted genocide — pesky brown people still walking the earth, not respecting colonial borders. Then, to the East, we have ‘Israel’s’ incomplete genocide of Palestine, which has turned into a regional rebellion against America. Finally, to the west there’s China — which America actually wants to fight — but they can’t even get to that side of the bar without ten other guys punching them.
Meanwhile, within America, they are deeply divided internally (ie, they hate themselves) and the climate is collapsing atop everything (the gods hate them too).
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GARLAND NIXON—We live in exciting times, declares the author, as he reviews the simultaneous crises besieging the empire on many fronts, conflicts that clearly presage America’s defeat in its ill-managed wars to maintain global hegemony. Humanity has never seen anything like this, he notes, a nuclear imperial superpower imploding against its will. It’s a fascinating topic, one that affects us all on this planet, and Garland turns it into a spellbinding tale. No ONE surpasses Garland when it comes to engaging, highly inventive explanations for complex social and political phenomena. This is truly a MUST-WATCH video.
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MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in order to maintain the system, you can’t have a rivalry to neoliberalism. There must be no alternative in the United States. Why is it fighting against China? China is an alternative. Russia is an alternative. If the world sees that the US and NATO, Europe are shrinking, and Eurasia is going way ahead, then there obviously is an alternative, and people are going to ask, what makes the Eurasian multipolar development so different from the world that the United States is trying to create, a neoliberal, financialized, privatized world ruling by force and by client military oligarchies?
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THE BROADER VIEW: How Finance Capitalism Ruined the World
7 minutes readEDITOR—Dr. Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. Dr. Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. A post-Keynesian, he criticizes neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. Our conversation examines the false dichotomy of capitalism v. socialism and considers the true dichotomy, which is industrial capitalism v. finance capitalism. Hudson and Keen argue that the transition to finance capitalism, where unearned income is considered economic growth, has truly sown the seeds to ruin the world. Tell us what you think in the comments!