Naked Capitalism has republished the article Michael Hudson: American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama. The original, American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama, is on his web site.

Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.

What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear. Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19th and early 20th century.

Back in 2009, CNET had the article Micropayments: The business model that never was.

Micropayments are a worse fit with today’s Web environment than during their first boomlet in the dot-com era. Part of this is simply that people have gotten used to free news and other content on the Web. There are also more sources of news than ever–albeit much of it duplicative and often relying on major news organizations for source material. However, more broadly, linking and search have become such fundamental drivers of traffic that anything behind a pay-wall (as subscription-only content inevitably is) will take a huge traffic hit. This makes such content less relevant; it also hurts ad revenue.

I agree with those arguing that micropayments are again raising their head not because changes in technology or consumer behavior now make them viable.

I am not sure it was right back then and less sure that it is correct now. The economic war that is being fought against independent news may be a sufficient to bring back the idea.

Democracy At Work has the episode Economic Update: The Great Replacement Theory.

In this week’s show, Prof Wolff discusses the replacement theory’s grain of truth amidst its mostly ideological function: to save capitalism from criticism. He analyzes why US capitalists deprived so many white, male, Christian workers of their jobs, incomes, and social standing over recent decades and why that analysis was largely silenced by Cold War taboos since 1945. Were a new US left-labor alliance now to offer that critical-of-capitalism alternative, replacement theory’s notion of a great conspiracy (largely by Democrats) to replace white, male, Christians with “others” would be far less socially influential.

In the second half, Richard Wolff comes very close to proposing a solution.

I left a comment to try to push them onto the target he came close to seeing.

The solution for getting the story out there is right in front of you, but content creators just don’t seem to see it. Content creators need to form a cooperative that will provide the means to get the word out and support the livelihoods of the content creators. This cooperative would provide a subscription service that gives access to the content-creators and provide them micropayments from the paid subscriptions. The micro payments would be given out in proportion to the subscribers’ consumption of content creators’ product. As a proponent of everything Co-op, you should have the knowledge of how to do this. Why don’t you do this?

Bernie Sanders has written an opinion piece in The Guardian – Let’s rebuild the US microchip industry – not give it a $50bn-plus check.

If private companies are going to benefit from taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people

To me, this makes a lot more sense than a blanket refusal to support vital USA companies. Perhaps the USA government could get some voting stock shares of the company in return for its investment. These shares could be put into the Social Security Trust fund for safe keeping and management. I think shares would be better than putting in short-sighted and overly specific requirements in return for the investment. What seems like wise behavior today, might not be suitable in the future.

The Saker has published the article Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place.

Michael Hudson’s Major Lecture at the Global University in China on July 11th, 2022 – and posted with Dr Hudson’s permission

Micheal Hudson has laid it all out in blunt terms in a single lecture. I have selected a few excerpts to give you some idea of what is in this lecture.

The lesson of history is thus that a strong government regulatory power is required to prevent oligarchies from emerging and using creditor claims and land grabbing to turn the citizenry into debtors, renters, clients and ultimately serfs.
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The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank monetized $8 trillion to save the financial elite’s holdings of stocks, bonds and packaged real estate mortgages instead of rescuing the victims of junk mortgages and over-indebted foreign countries. The European Central Bank did much the same thing to save the wealthiest Europeans from losing the market value of their financial wealth.

But it was too late to save the U.S. and European economies. The long post-1945 debt buildup has run its course. The U.S. economy has been deindustrialized, its infrastructure is collapsing and its population is so deeply indebted that little disposable income is left to support living standards. Much as occurred with Rome’s Empire, the American response is to try to maintain the prosperity of its own financial elite by exploiting foreign countries. That is aim of today’s New Cold War diplomacy. It involves extracting economic tribute by pushing foreign economies further into dollarized debt, to be paid by imposing depression and austerity on themselves.
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NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Sea.

YouTube has the short video Where The Term Redneck Comes From.

If you don’t know this story, you’ll never look at the word the same again.

This is just a window into the sometimes shocking, subversive and untold history of the United States, from the film Plutocracy by Scott Noble.

Watch the full documentary here: https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/plutocracy/

Sometimes learning just a little history is good to refresh the society’s memory of how we got to where we are. Sometimes we really need the Second Amendment.

Richard Medhurst has the video Are You Criticising the West, You Commie? | Red Scare 3.0

Some people have been so scared by the ridiculous propaganda that they can’t think straight anymore.

One thing I recognized when the Soviet Union collapsed was that the threat of communism had been so scary to the oligarchs that it forced them to treat their workers better than they wanted to. Once the threat of communism was gone, the oligarchs could treat workers as badly as they could get way with. It made no difference if communism worked or not, it was the fear that workers would like it that kept western oligarchs in check.

Once west’s workers start to understand the mixed economies of China and now Russia, they will realize how badly they are being treated. This is why the oligarchs in the west feel that they need to restart the red scare.

Once Hillary Clinton realized that her invention of Russiagate could serve two purpose, she charged full speed ahead. One purpose was to absolve her of any possible blame for running a disastrous campaign for President in 2016. The other purpose was to justify her neoliberal philosophy of suppressing the workers, some of whom she called “the deplorables”.

CBS News is one source that has covered the news story Supreme Court marshal wants crack down on picketing, protests outside justices’ homes.

The marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court has asked Maryland and Virginia officials to step up the enforcement of laws she says prohibit picketing outside the homes of the justices who live in the two states.

“For weeks on end, large groups of protesters chanting slogans, using bullhorns, and banging drums have picketed Justices’ homes,” Marshal Gail Curley wrote in the Friday letters to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and two local elected officials.

Oddly enough, this activity is covered in the USA Constitution in the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Can the Supreme Court be charged with violating picketers’ civil rights? Who would arrest them? Who would try them? Where would they be jailed to serve out their sentences?

Naked capitalism has the article The Fed Tackles Kalecki.

Given the nature of the current supply shocks affecting our weak Covid-battered economies, orchestrating another Volcker-style scenario by creating yet another deep recession is chilling. Besides, it would appear to be somewhat in conflict with the above assessment of former US Fed Chair Janet Yellen in 2019 as well as with the research of these two US Fed economists, Ratner and Sim, who suggest that the slope of the Phillips Curve is actually relatively flat and it has remained so for decades, for reasons that have little to do directly with the Volcker shock of the early 1980s.

Does anybody factor in the de-industrialization of the USA economy which is facilitated by China’s ability to substitute its industry for the industry the USA is giving up? How long can this substitution continue to increase? As long as it is more profitable to let China do all the manufacturing, why should the USA capitalists put their money into less profitable increases in domestic capacity? Leaving out de-industrialization and de-dollarization is leaving out the main factors influencing our economy. How can you have a good analysis and prediction when you leave out the most important factors in your models.