And if there is another successful economy, whether it is China, or Russia, or Iran, or Venezuela – if there’s any other economy that retains a strong state power, strong regulatory power, progressive taxation, preventing a landlord class from somehow increasing housing costs, privatizing medical and health insurance, so instead of making it a public right – well, if we can prevent that from occurring anywhere, then people will really believe there is no alternative but to let our takeover that reverses the entire last two centuries of free market economics, and now the economy has to be free for the 1% to take over government enterprise, to privatize every part of government, including government itself, including the central banks especially, and including the health system, the educational system – all running either for profit or at a cost that has to be paid by credit creation, and essentially recreate the economy of the 13th century. Well Chileans didn’t elect Pinochet either. As the “democratic center of the world,” America gets to designate the heads of any given country, by military force when necessary. And so of course, the gold supply was simply grabbed by England – which again, is a small branch, totally dependent on the United States – and grabbed the gold; they grabbed all of Venezuela’s holdings, its oil company’s distribution network and gas stations in the United States. Because only the Americans can have the intellectual property monopoly, something that Blinken mentioned in his speech, and that President Biden mentioned. The intellectual property monopoly means that America gets to tell other countries, our firms have the right to say, “Your money or your life” to Third World countries.

Vladimir Lenin disagreed with Kautsky's approach. In an introduction to Nikolai Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy written in 1916, he conceded that "in the abstract one can think of such a phase. In practice, however, he who denies the sharp tasks of to-day in the name of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist". [7] If you tax away the land rent, then this cannot be capitalized into higher value. And if you tax the land rent, number one, you don’t have to tax income, you don’t have to have a sales tax, you tax only the unearned economic rent.

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And the US has, it seems – and I want to get your view on this – successfully disrupted this massive EU-Chinese trade deal by weaponizing human rights allegations, talking about the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, or the supposedly poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. The desirable goal of reforming the international monetary system, therefore, is to create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.

The larger their surpluses grow, the more dollars they are obliged to put into US Treasury securities. Hence, the book’s title, Super Imperialism. And the even more vicious arm of American imperialism, probably the most deadly, is the World Bank, which is enormously destructive, throughout the former Soviet Union, in the Third World, by pushing micro-currency loans that are aimed at essentially making loans to women as heads of families, 70%, 80%, and then breaking up the family, foreclosing on them – essentially using microcredit loans as a way of evicting masses of families from their property, and turning it over to the client oligarchies in these countries. Summary : With intensifying concerns regarding the soundness and stability of the international monetary and financial system, calls for reforming it have been on the rise. One recent call was made by the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, in August 2019, in which he suggested a synthetic hegemonic currency to replace the US dollar as the key reserve currency. Whether such calls will lead to an end of the key reserve currency status of the dollar remains to be seen. And that will be our means of, “Well, you can’t pay, well, why don’t you sell off some more of your infrastructure? Why don’t you sell off more of your oil or mineral resources to us?” T S (2015a): “Greece, Its International Creditors and the Euro,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 50, No 7, pp 10–12.It used to be, they’d say, if you don’t like it, why don’t you go to Russia? Nobody says that anymore. But what are you going to do? Oh, well, OxyContin I guess is the alternative.

Michael Hudson’s in-depth and highly controversial study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception which — he argues — were intended to preserve the US’s financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the international economic system has become apparent; the IMF and World Bank were set up to give aid to developing countries, but instead many of the world’s poorest countries have been plunged into insurmountable debt crises. So, according to the US Department of State, this conference was more about free trade than an international monetary system. The monetary system was to ensure that high tariff barriers, competitive currency devaluations, discriminatory trading blocs and the like did not occur. Collapse of the Bretton Woods system The US government has of course its military apparatus, which we talk about a lot here at Moderate Rebels and The Grayzone, with the war in Iraq, the war in Syria, the war in Libya, but then there’s also the economic form that imperialism takes. And Michael Hudson wrote the book “Super Imperialism” that details exactly how this system works.

Our international monetary and financial system is broken. Indeed, it was this conclusion and the observations I have made in this and other articles that led me to ask the question in the title of this article: Are we approaching the end of Super Imperialism? The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton interview world-renowned economist Michael Hudson on his concept of American “super imperialism” and the economics of the new cold war on China and Russia. And it’s a problem that I have a book coming out on this, a series of my lectures in China dealing with this, that will be available in about three months. Hudson, M (1972): Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. And all the classical economics, the whole concept of free markets, from the physiocrats, with their laissez faire to Adam Smith, through John Stuart Mill, the whole of classical economics was to free industrial capitalism from the rentier class, from the landlords, and from banking and the monopolies that banks created in organizing trusts.

Now, landlords don’t create this prosperity; they don’t create the public infrastructure that raises value. If you do not tax it away, then all of this rental value is going to be available to be pledged to banks, and the banks will lend enough money so that the mortgage interest is going to absorb all of the land rent. He is regarded as sort of, almost a scientific expert. Whereas when Joe Rogan says something that might be seen as sensible about vaccination, Anthony Fauci comes out and condemns him as not a scientific expert. I don’t even believe Bill Gates has a college degree. It’s the same mentality of trying to create a privatized monopoly to prevent health care from being offered freely – to say, every public utility, from education, to health care, to transportation has to be offered at cost, and that cost will include a profit – and in fact, whatever the market will bear for economic rent, and dividends, and management fees, and consulting fees, until it all looks like the military-industrial complex applied to the hitherto public sector.

So while on the one hand, he’s continuing the nationalistic trade policies of the Trump administration, he’s escalating the cold war against Russia and China, in the belief that somehow if he can impose sanctions and punish them economically, that will lead to a fall of the government. Well, you can see what he’s projecting here. So if you look at the sanctions against Russia and China as a way to split Europe and make Europe increasingly dependent on the United States, not only for gas, and energy, but also for vaccines.