Understanding the US - Again

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A_Gupta
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by A_Gupta »

Thanks, NRao! I didn't know that about Kagan.

The history you have cited is by Ian Atoll, and it too is not accurate, or at least, the situation was much more complicated than what you have cited. e.g., see on books.google.com:
Frank, Benis M. Victory and Occupation. Vol. 5. Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, US Marine Corps, 1968.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

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Cyrano
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sanman
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by sanman »

California Congresswoman Aisha Wahab tweets the following:

https://twitter.com/aishabbwahab/status ... 2681106433
Met a large coalition of Indian Americans in Fremont wanting to discuss SB403! We heard their thoughts, concerns, and answered questions. I’m meeting with more and more individuals on this historic bill. SB403 will prohibit the discrimination based on caste.
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gakakkad
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by gakakkad »

seem like khalistanis. they don't even consider themselves as indians do they. i know a few who self identify as whites .others are definitely pakees.

pretty sure this is funded by Soros with ideological support from napakees...OSF is one of the funders of equality labs...

pretty amazing how a shit poor entity like pokiland and a non-ideology like khalistan is able to come up with stuff like this..

we need some yindoo with big balls and a deep pocket to screw them .... like Peter thiel screwed gawker a few years ago...there are plenty of people (including thiel) who are really against Soros and would be happy to help out as well...

HAF needs to change strategy and become aggressive. Go after anyone who tries to screw with us...just like the Yehuds would let lose ADL against anyone trying to be antisemitic...
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by vera_k »

Thanks for posting. While outwardly involving India, what we're seeing in the USA appears to be a Pakistan origin problem. That picture is pretty telling with most individuals visibly outfitted in attire seen in Punjab. Caste discrimination is illegal in India and indeed affirmative action is written into the constitution. Meanwhile in Pakistan -

How Caste Underpins the Blasphemy Crisis in Pakistan
It is now Muslims, especially in Punjab, who maintain a caste hierarchy. And since Islamic beliefs don’t include a caste system, the discrimination cannot be defined in terms of caste and is labeled religious. This shift was illustrated by turning Bibi’s quarrel over sharing water into blasphemy.
In Pakistan, both the discrimination of caste and the history of religious difference are officially proscribed and forgotten. But for this very reason they continue to haunt the present in disavowed ways that include the charge of blasphemy against Ms. Bibi. In this sense, the passionate defense of their prophet represents a kind of traumatic memory, one that only allows Muslims to obscure a reality that remains unrecognized and therefore unresolved.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by sanman »

gakakkad wrote:seem like khalistanis.
Gee, ya think? :roll:
It seems that California is the new Canada.

Just like the "Farm Protests" which strangely involved explosion of violence and putting Khalsa flag on Red Fort, it was never about farmers, it was always about Khalistan. Our idiot farmers just allowed themselves to be roped in like suckers.
they don't even consider themselves as indians do they. i know a few who self identify as whites .others are definitely pakees.
Pakistanis know that the road to J&K runs through Punjab. It was by setting Punjab on fire with Khalistan insurgency during the 1980s, that ISI was able to set J&K nextdoor on fire, so that it continued burning long after Punjab settled down. Removal of 370 has Pak desperate to revive Khalistan, to repeat the same strategy all over again.
pretty sure this is funded by Soros with ideological support from napakees...OSF is one of the funders of equality labs...

pretty amazing how a shit poor entity like pokiland and a non-ideology like khalistan is able to come up with stuff like this..
The crook who sued over caste needs to be exposed, and his name published far and wide. He needs intense media scrutiny, to expose his con game fully.
we need some yindoo with big balls and a deep pocket to screw them .... like Peter thiel screwed gawker a few years ago...there are plenty of people (including thiel) who are really against Soros and would be happy to help out as well...

HAF needs to change strategy and become aggressive. Go after anyone who tries to screw with us...just like the Yehuds would let lose ADL against anyone trying to be antisemitic...
I think that original crook who filed the bogus suit is the one who needs to be sued, and moreover his name and face need to be publicized all over among Indian media. This guy is the "Patient Zero" who became the origin point for what is now spreading like a virus.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cain Marko »

Apart from exacting action being taken against separatist ideologues and leaders, there is some work that needs to be done within bharatiya community.

One thing that dharmics need to do is very clearly define themselves as dharmic, and not anything else. Identification with Hinduism as religion similar to other religions is a huge issue that has caused a lot of confusion and inaction. This Hinduism thing has to be dropped as a colonial artifact ASAP.

For one, there is no such thing as a Hindu religion.
Two, propping it up as such with it's own credo, beliefs and rituals only confuses and cannot really be done with a people steeped in dharmic values.
Three, if you do succeed and create a religion called Hinduism with all the trappings that go with various sampradayas, it will have the invariable effect of being seen as a competition to the rest, and be treated as such.
This has the dangerous potential to alienate other dharmics. Before you know it, you could have Jains, Buddhists etc. Creating their own separatist movements.

Modi, rss and bjp brains better start pruning this bad habit that has taken hold of Bharatiyas. Well meaning folks using ideas like Hindu rashtra and making equal equal with Islamic and Christian nations could open a can of worms that can't be closed and could utterly disrupt Indian dreams in the near future.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Vayutuvan »

I always come up against the difficulty of describing sanaatana dharma in one word.
This is a non-translatable. I am unable solve this problem. Yet.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cain Marko »

Vayutuvan wrote:I always come up against the difficulty of describing sanaatana dharma in one word.
This is a non-translatable. I am unable solve this problem. Yet.
You are in good company then sir. Even great ones could only wax lyrical about it. But that i think is one reason it remains eternal, ever new (nitya nutan...sanatan). I think Adi Shakara came closest to a universal definition when He said Dharma is that which brings about the material and spiritual welfare of all. Let it be. It is enough for dharmics to call themselves that... Whatever it may mean to them at a more personal level.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

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Bhai log, by not (being able to) define what Hinduism is and not calling ourselves Hindus are we not putting ourselves at a disadvantage by not qualifying for certain types of legal rights and protections offered to recognised religions ? I believe this is the case in many countries outside India and in certain instances even within the ambit of Indian laws.

As the only surviving ancient system, perhaps we should pragmatically call ourselves Hindus and take on this label for convenience while transacting with western institutions, but in no way be limited by that label in our private lives.

JMT...
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by g.sarkar »

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/nyre ... ition.html
Trump Is Questioned in N.Y. Attorney General’s Lawsuit
Letitia James, the attorney general, has sued Donald J. Trump and three of his children, accusing them of a “staggering” fraud.
Ben Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich and William K. Rashbaum, April 13, 2023

Donald J. Trump was questioned under oath on Thursday in a civil fraud lawsuit brought by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, the latest in a series of legal predicaments entangling the former president, who also faces a separate 34-count criminal indictment unsealed last week.
Ms. James’s civil case, which was filed in September and is expected to go to trial later this year, accuses Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud for overvaluing the former president’s assets by billions of dollars. The lawsuit seeks $250 million that Ms. James contends the Trumps reaped through those deceptions, and asks a judge to essentially run the former president out of business in the state if he is found liable at trial.
Mr. Trump was questioned for much of the day on Thursday — arriving at Ms. James’s office in Lower Manhattan shortly before 10 a.m. and departing just after 6 p.m. — as part of the discovery phase of the case, in preparation for the trial.
While the deposition was held in private, people with knowledge of the proceeding said that Mr. Trump answered questions without asserting his right against self-incrimination. The session was neither overly combative nor polite, they said, but Mr. Trump provided some substantive answers.
“As we have said from day one, there is no absolutely no case,” her statement said.
This is the second time that lawyers for Ms. James have questioned Mr. Trump under oath. But the first time he sat for a deposition, in the summer of 2022, Mr. Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right hundreds of times over four hours. During that deposition, which came shortly before the attorney general filed her lawsuit, Mr. Trump lashed out at Ms. James, a Democrat, accusing her of being motivated by politics, before refusing to answer questions.
......
Gautam
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cain Marko »

Cyrano wrote:Bhai log, by not (being able to) define what Hinduism is and not calling ourselves Hindus are we not putting ourselves at a disadvantage by not qualifying for certain types of legal rights and protections offered to recognised religions ? I believe this is the case in many countries outside India and in certain instances even within the ambit of Indian laws.

As the only surviving ancient system, perhaps we should pragmatically call ourselves Hindus and take on this label for convenience while transacting with western institutions, but in no way be limited by that label in our private lives.

JMT...
I see the temptation of political expediency but i believe this can have a great cost, the loss of support from other dharmics and dangerous stereo typing from bif. Esp dangerous within desh as such types will be used to fracture and disrupt society at every corner by polarizing (and alienating) large sections of Indian society. In which case more farmers protests, caste based politics etc can be expected. The demand for a Hindu rashtra (Whatever that means) is one such minefield. I have no idea what is to be achieved here.

For nri type, one can define oneself as ethnic Hindu more accurately then a religious Hindu IMHO. This will allow for religious privileges within the ethnic identification.

In any case, What privileges have Hindus benefited from so far? Building temples? This could easily be achieved by religiously identifying as Vaishnava, Shaiva, Nath, etc. I believe Iskcon and Akshardham sect have already achieved this. This is also more in line with the tradition In india where it is common practice to have separate temple for particular deity instead of having megaplex style temples as seen in US. Seems to me that this is necessary to make the temple a Jagrut sthana. This separation is granular down to the family level via a Kuldevata.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cyrano »

For the outsider, it doesnt matter if you are a vaishnava or shaiva or something else. You are a pagan/kaffir idol worshipper. From a legal perspective you will be able to claim any protections offered to other religions only if you identify as a religion. Thats how the system is set, and the reality in which we need to operate. For that, a catch all Hindu label is a necessary step. I'm not sure just because we adopt that label, why would that compel us to forgo the different paths within the hindu fold. Secondly, why would it make us any less accepting of the paths ? If anything, it would reinforce the view that irrespective of which path or sampradaya you follow, you are still a Hindu. Thirdly, as someone mentioned above, some 60+ countries even today do not recognise Hinduism as a religion. Is it practical to expect we can get them to recognise several paths within it as full fledged religions each in its own right?

Also your statement that there are separate temples for each deity is not accurate. There is always a main deity, but in any big temple, you will see other deities as well. A Ram temple will have Shri Ram as the main deity, but you will often find a smaller temple for Hanuman, for Laskshmi, for Ganesh, for Navagrahas etc. This is especially true in South India, each temple is called a "sannidhi". So we invented multiplexes centuries ago!

I've been to several Iskon temples, not to any Akshardham so far (unintentional). Iskon by its name itself declares its intent to spread a specific path of worship not just in India but Internationally. So its understandable and perfectly fine as well that they almost exclusively have Krishna as the main deity and nothing else. Easier to communicate than with a plethora of deities for their purposes.

What is the "loss of support from other dharmics" you are referring to? I'm not sure I follow.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cyrano »

Sub national engagement has started !
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by vimal »

^^ Wut is this? :rotfl:
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by drnayar »

Cyrano wrote:Sub national engagement has started !
[youtube]wUdWUaGVqXg

Thats quite enough to send him back packing :mrgreen:
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by RoyG »

It's fine. The staff are welcoming the new guy.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by chetak »

RoyG wrote:It's fine. The staff are welcoming the new guy.
never seen it done for any us ambassador

garcetti would rank among the most mediocre of the us diplomatic worthies ever to grace India's shores
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by RoyG »

chetak wrote:
RoyG wrote:It's fine. The staff are welcoming the new guy.
never seen it done for any us ambassador

garcetti would rank among the most mediocre of the us diplomatic worthies ever to grace India's shores
It doesn't even matter. Relations have been fine without any ambassador. Having one isn't going to add much to the mix.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Pratyush »

There is a limit to what this administration can do. Most likely they are not coming back in 2024.

If Ukraine turns into a debacle like afghanistan. That coupled with de dollarisation will then reduce US ability to act inside India to zero.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cyrano »

Yeons ago yours truly was a starry eyed yumbeeyay in the making devouring business journals incl the 2 months old phoren mags that eventually crossed oceans and made it to our library. But this one literally got me :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by vijayk »

Great discussion on State Dept.
Finding Americans who understand the world outside the USA is very rare. The SD needs to hire few people like this instead of the current crop of people they have.. The SD and US Consulates are more interested in gender neutral bathrooms and trans diplomacy than about the relations with countries. Talks about regime change efforts by US in India too

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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Vayutuvan »

RoyG wrote:It doesn't even matter. Relations have been fine without any ambassador. Having one isn't going to add much to the mix.
He is going to subtract - negative influence! :mrgreen:
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

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In the name and also in the interests of double standards

NYT claims it speaks "truth to power".

Now it says it may be in nobody's interest to find the truth.

This is the bitter truth of western normative framework.
@nytimes
Intelligence leaks surrounding who blew up most of the Russian-backed Nord Stream pipelines last September have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/worl ... tw-nytimes

the news is dated but neither the news nor the self serving interests behind façade of this news coverage are in the interests of the amriki state.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Pratyush »

NYT is also a paper that covered up the slaughter of Jews in Europe before the US entry into the world war.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by chetak »

Pratyush wrote:NYT is also a paper that covered up the slaughter of Jews in Europe before the US entry into the world war.
very true

Seymour Hersh's brilliantly researched article, "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline." has set the cat among the pigeons and has raised lots of very uncomfortable questions for the amriki state, deep or otherwise...


watch the video where nuland and biden are are laying out amriki policy/intentions as regards the nordstrean 2 pipeline

Things could not be more clear..


watch video
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by A_Gupta »

FYI:
https://unherd.com/thepost/osint-picks- ... am-claims/
“ OSINT picks holes in Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream claims”

https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blo ... ershs-pipe
“ Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.”
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

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https://www.wionews.com/world/us-dollar ... len-583125
US dollar may lose its dominance if nations are sanctioned, warns Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.


U think Madam? :rotfl:
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by g.sarkar »

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ce-ukraine
The Pentagon leaks reveal the rot at the heart of US intelligence – but they haven’t hurt Ukraine
This latest cache of secret documents is yet another own goal by a pathologically confused security service
Frank Ledwidge, Mon 17 Apr 2023

So far this century, there have been three major public “compromises” of US intelligence material. The first – the WikiLeaks series initiated by Chelsea Manning – revealed the mayhem at the heart of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Edward Snowden’s vast cache uncovered the US state’s campaign of unlawful surveillance against its own people. Over the past week, we have seen yet another collection of secret documents ruffle the feathers of US intelligence.
Of the three sets of leaks, the most recent is, in itself, the least politically damaging. But what they demonstrate again is the dangerous self-created and continuing rot at the heart of the US intelligence system: the combination of over-classification and the widespread availability of access to secret material.
Given the nature of the documents available so far, most of which seem to be daily updates and analysis, there seems to be little operationally damaging intelligence. Most significant perhaps is the “revelation” that US intelligence was spying on allies such as South Korea and Israel. Any government leader with significant links to the US who believes their ally is not keeping a close eye on them needs to fire their counterintelligence advisers. It therefore should have come as no surprise to President Zelenskiy that he was also on the receiving end of US surveillance. As for the UK, no one should have been shocked by the news that the only UK troops not subject to any form of effective democratic oversight – special forces – are deployed in Ukraine in considerable numbers.
It is unlikely that these people (and their counterparts from elsewhere in Europe and the US) are directly involved in combat; rather, they are training Ukrainian soldiers and assisting in planning operations. While it would be difficult for Russia to argue that their presence denoted direct involvement, should the opportunity present itself it could suit Russia to do so, nonetheless. Also of some significance are the concerns expressed in the leaks that Ukraine may “fall short” in its long-awaited spring offensive. While much has been made of this, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the US chiefs of staff, has recently made similar views clear in public.
More importantly, the leak represents another own goal by an intelligence bureaucracy with a pathologically confused attitude to information management. A rational approach to access to secret information is based around classification according to reasonably clear definitions of various levels of secrecy; distinguishing and defining “confidential”, “secret” or “top secret”, for instance.
So far so good; the US does this well. This should be accompanied by a “need to know” approach. In other words, “Does a person or institution with access really need to know this to function effectively?” One might be given to wonder why a junior reservist airman in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – if indeed he was the source of the Discord leaks – should “need to know” about Ukrainian plans to strike Russia, or the political machinations of the Israeli intelligence services.
........
Gautam
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by Cyrano »

Attack intelligence agencies to deflect from the cess pool state department!
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by sanman »

I thought this was quite telling about Blinken --- he's not in the Biden cabinet as someone with foreign policy expertise, he's just there purely as a political crony



Honest A.Blinken :rotfl:
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Post by Pratyush »

Why is this a surprise?

Blinken has been attached to Biden for decades. He was his chief of staff when he was a senator.

So he will do everything necessary to further Biden's interests.
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Post by sanman »



Robert Kennedy's son, RFK Jr has announced his bid for the US presidential elections -- and yet the media are completely ignoring it.

I know you'll tell me that he's not a major political figure, but the fact that he comes from a family with well-known political credentials and isn't even getting a tiny smidgeon of acknowledgement by the media says something.

The power-mongers on the Left and their media minions have gone all-in on their preferred candidates, and won't allocate the slightest bit of room for anyone or anything else outside of their designated circle of picks. They're purely playing for power, and ideological debates are therefore no permitted within their ranks.

The Democrats have no sense of the past - JFK, RFK, etc are dead to them, and they've completely moved on. By contrast, have Republicans forgotten Reagan, or even Nixon for that matter? No, they have a sense of continuity from the past, unlike the Democrats who undergo Orwellian shifts in their perspectives.
Monday: "Today we are at war with Eurasia! We have always been at war with Eurasia!"
Tuesday:"Today we are at war with Oceania! We have always been at war with Oceania!"
Etc, etc. :roll:

This is why I'm quite sure the day is not far off when the American Left will turn against certain minorities (ie. Indians and other Asians), as their politics of expediency drives another Orwellian shift.
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Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by ArjunPandit »

https://unherd.com/2023/04/americas-empire-is-bankrupt/
Let’s start with the basics. Roughly 5% of the human race currently live in the United States of America. That very small fraction of humanity, until quite recently, enjoyed about a third of the world’s energy resources and manufactured products and about a quarter of its raw materials. This didn’t happen because nobody else wanted these things, or because the US manufactured and sold something so enticing that the rest of the world eagerly handed over its wealth in exchange. It happened because, as the dominant nation, the US imposed unbalanced patterns of exchange on the rest of the world, and these funnelled a disproportionate share of the planet’s wealth to itself.

There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement. In its day, the British Empire controlled an even larger share of the planet’s wealth, and the Spanish Empire played a comparable role further back. Before then, there were other empires, though limits to transport technologies meant that their reach wasn’t as large. Nor, by the way, was any of this an invention of people with light-coloured skin. Mighty empires flourished in Asia and Africa when the peoples of Europe lived in thatched-roofed mud huts. Empires rise whenever a nation becomes powerful enough to dominate other nations and drain them of wealth. They’ve thrived as far back as records go and they’ll doubtless thrive for as long as human civilisations exist.

America’s empire came into being in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, during the fratricidal European wars of the early 20th century. Throughout those bitter years, the role of global hegemon was up for grabs, and by 1930 or so it was pretty clear that Germany, the Soviet Union or the US would end up taking the prize. In the usual way, two contenders joined forces to squeeze out the third, and then the victors went at each other, carving out competing spheres of influence until one collapsed. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the US emerged as the last empire standing.

Francis Fukuyama insisted in a 1989 essay that having won the top slot, the US was destined to stay there forever. He was, of course, wrong, but then he was a Hegelian and couldn’t help it. (If a follower of Hegel tells you the sky is blue, go look.) The ascendancy of one empire guarantees that other aspirants for the same status will begin sharpening their knives. They’ll get to use them, too, because empires invariably wreck themselves: over time, the economic and social consequences of empire destroy the conditions that make empire possible. That can happen quickly or slowly, depending on the mechanism that each empire uses to extract wealth from its subject nations.

The mechanism the US used for this latter purpose was ingenious but even more short-term than most. In simple terms, the US imposed a series of arrangements on most other nations that guaranteed the lion’s share of international trade would use US dollars as the medium of exchange, and saw to it that an ever-expanding share of world economic activity required international trade. (That’s what all that gabble about “globalisation” meant in practice.) This allowed the US government to manufacture dollars out of thin air by way of gargantuan budget deficits, so that US interests could use those dollars to buy up vast amounts of the world’s wealth. Since the excess dollars got scooped up by overseas central banks and business firms, which needed them for their own foreign trade, inflation stayed under control while the wealthy classes in the US profited mightily.



The problem with this scheme is the same difficulty faced by all Ponzi schemes, which is that, sooner or later, you run out of suckers to draw in. This happened not long after the turn of the millennium, and along with other factors — notably the peaking of global conventional petroleum production — it led to the financial crisis of 2008-2010. Since 2010 the US has been lurching from one crisis to another. This is not accidental. The wealth pump that kept the US at the top of the global pyramid has been sputtering as a growing number of nations have found ways to keep a larger share of their own wealth by expanding their domestic markets and raising the kind of trade barriers the US used before 1945 to build its own economy. The one question left is how soon the pump will start to fail altogether.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies responded not with military force but with punitive economic sanctions, which were expected to cripple the Russian economy and force Russia to its knees. Apparently, nobody in Washington considered the possibility that other nations with an interest in undercutting the US empire might have something to say about that. Of course, that’s what happened. China, which has the largest economy on Earth in purchasing-power terms, extended a middle finger in the direction of Washington and upped its imports of Russian oil, gas, grain and other products. So did India, currently the third-largest economy on Earth in the same terms; as did more than 100 other countries.

Then there’s Iran, which most Americans are impressively stupid about. Iran is the 17th largest nation in the world, more than twice the size of Texas and even more richly stocked with oil and natural gas. It’s also a booming industrial power. It has a thriving automobile industry, for example, and builds and launches its own orbital satellites. It’s been dealing with severe US sanctions since not long after the Shah fell in 1978, so it’s a safe bet that the Iranian government and industrial sector know every imaginable trick for getting around those sanctions.

Right after the start of the Ukraine war, Russia and Iran suddenly started inking trade deals to Iran’s great benefit. Clearly, one part of the quid pro quo was that the Iranians passed on their hard-earned knowledge about how to dodge sanctions to an attentive audience of Russian officials. With a little help from China, India and most of the rest of humanity, the total failure of the sanctions followed in short order. Today, the sanctions are hurting the US and Europe, not Russia, but the US leadership has wedged itself into a position from which it can’t back down. This may go a long way towards explaining why the Russian campaign in Ukraine has been so leisurely. The Russians have no reason to hurry. They know that time is not on the side of the US.

For many decades now, the threat of being cut out of international trade by US sanctions was the big stick Washington used to threaten unruly nations that weren’t small enough for a US invasion or fragile enough for a CIA-backed regime-change operation. Over the last year, that big stick turned out to be made of balsa wood and snapped off in Joe Biden’s hand. As a result, all over the world, nations that thought they had no choice but to use dollars in their foreign trade are switching over to their own currencies, or to the currencies of rising powers. The US dollar’s day as the global medium of exchange is thus ending.

It’s been interesting to watch economic pundits reacting to this. As you might expect, quite a few of them simply deny that it’s happening — after all, economic statistics from previous years don’t show it yet, Some others have pointed out that no other currency is ready to take on the dollar’s role; this is true, but irrelevant. When the British pound lost a similar role in the early years of the Great Depression, no other currency was ready to take on its role either. It wasn’t until 1970 or so that the US dollar finished settling into place as the currency of global trade. In the interval, international trade lurched along awkwardly using whatever currencies or commodity swaps the trading partners could settle on: that is to say, the same situation that’s taking shape around us in the free-for-all of global trade that will define the post-dollar era.

One of the interesting consequences of the shift now under way is a reversion to the mean of global wealth distribution. Until the era of European global empire, the economic heart of the world was in east and south Asia. India and China were the richest countries on the planet, and a glittering necklace of other wealthy states from Iran to Japan filled in the picture. To this day, most of the human population is found in the same part of the world. The great age of European conquest temporarily diverted much of that wealth to Europe, impoverishing Asia in the process. That condition began to break down with the collapse of European colonial empires in the decade following the Second World War, but some of the same arrangements were propped up by the US thereafter. Now those are coming apart, and Asia is rising. By next year, four of the five largest economies on the planet in terms of purchasing power parity will be Asian. The fifth is the US, and it may not be in that list for much longer.

In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

This is not going to be a fast process. The US dollar is losing its place as the universal medium of foreign trade, but it will still be used by some countries for years to come. The unravelling of the arrangements that direct unearned wealth to the US will go a little faster, but that will still take time. The collapse of the cubicle class and the gutting of the suburbs will unfold over decades. That’s the way changes of this kind play out.

As for what people can do in response this late in the game, I refer to a post I made on The Archdruid Report in 2012 titled “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. In that post I pointed out that the unravelling of the American economy, and the broader project of industrial civilisation, was picking up speed around us, and those who wanted to get ready for it needed to start preparing soon by cutting their expenses, getting out of debt, and picking up the skills needed to produce goods and services for people rather than the corporate machine. I’m glad to say that some people did these things, but a great many others rolled their eyes, or made earnest resolutions to do something as soon as things were more convenient, which they never were.

Over the years that followed I repeated that warning and then moved on to other themes, since there really wasn’t much point to harping on about the approaching mess when the time to act had slipped away. Those who made preparations in time will weather the approaching mess as well as anyone can. Those who didn’t? The rush is here. I’m sorry to say that whatever you try, it’s likely that there’ll be plenty of other frantic people trying to do the same thing. You might still get lucky, but it’s going to be a hard row to hoe.

Mind you, I expect some people to take a different tack. In the months before a prediction of mine comes true, I reliably field a flurry of comments insisting that I’m too rigid and dogmatic in my views about the future, that I need to be more open-minded about alternative possibilities, that wonderful futures are still in reach, and so on. I got that in 2008 just before the real estate bubble started to go bust, as I’d predicted, and I also got it in 2010 just before the price of oil peaked and started to slide, as I’d also predicted, taking the peak oil movement with it. I’ve started to field the same sort of criticism once again.

We are dancing on the brink of a long slippery slope into an unwelcome new reality. I’d encourage readers in America and its close allies to brace themselves for a couple of decades of wrenching economic, social, and political turmoil. Those elsewhere will have an easier time of it, but it’s still going to be a wild ride before the rubble stops bouncing, and new social, economic, and political arrangements get patched together out of the wreckage.
RoyG
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Joined: 10 Aug 2009 05:10

Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by RoyG »

Vayutuvan wrote:I always come up against the difficulty of describing sanaatana dharma in one word.
This is a non-translatable. I am unable solve this problem. Yet.
We may have a clue from arthashastra. My understanding is - system which facilitates realization (knowledge).

Because of colonialism we tend to ascribe an esoteric meaning to everything. We simply don't have religion. We have knowledge and a particular way of transmission.
vijayk
BRF Oldie
Posts: 8785
Joined: 22 Jun 1999 11:31

Re: Understanding the US - Again

Post by vijayk »

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4927730/ ... orge-soros
Hillary Clinton introduces George Soros at the "Take Back America Conference" in 2004. Soros discusses progressive ideologies, including Iraq, Al Qaeda, many anti-American theories. He also discussed putting his money where his mouth is and his book "The Bubble of American Supremacy
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