The problem for me is that you broaden out each issue into many parts and divert into side issues, then ask me to defend positions which I don’t recognise. And we seem to be talking past each other, where I’m looking at the big picture and avoiding the detail (because there’s so much of it) and you then select a few details and insist that I go into rabbit holes to argue particular points.
If we’re going to continue I would like to see your substantive answer to the OP, namely is, or isn’t America in danger of falling, failing. And then to identify the crux of the issue.
I’m getting a sense that your position is that it’s not falling and this is normal, just the slings and arrows of fortune, so to speak. That the wealthy are somehow in control, or holding the reins of power and that capitalism, as the engine of the economy a producer of wealth is turning in to crisis capitalism, which is destructive. This presupposes that the wealthy are (consciously?) driving this development.
Now my response to this is that I largely agree with your analysis, but don’t see the wealthy as consciously (in any kind of collective way) driving it and do see America in danger of falling.
Perhaps if we can focus on those two disagreements?
America is failing but has been for some time and it has nothing to do with Trump, or Putin, or populism.
It has to do with the fact that the capitalist system as instantiated has an inherent flaw. It relies on increasing production, and increasing extraction of wealth from the masses into an increasingly small group (ie increasing inequality). The basic problem then is that the capitalist needs both to increase sales and to decrease (relatively) the capacity of the workforce to make those purchases, all whilst avoiding the inevitable backlash from those masses they are pushing into relative poverty.
Solving this issue has been the object of capitalism since the 80s.
The first solution is debt - you simply lend the workforce the money, then they can make the purchases, be placated by the pleasures of wealth, but you still own the assets. This is obviously unsustainable as the debts can’t be paid.
So the solution to this is finacialisation - the turning of financial instruments based on this debt into products which can then be sold in lieu of actual manufactured goods. But this is unsustainable too because the debts end up end up toxic and the system crashes (as it did in 2008).
The next solution - largely initiated by the response to the 2008 crash, is what’s been coined ‘Crisis Capitalism’. The extraction of wealth not by the production of manufactured goods (though these are involved), or the sale of financial instruments, but by the extraction of government bond-based assets (ultimately taxes, of course) based on the short-term lending boom attached to a ‘crisis’, with the distraction that this entails keeping the ‘masses’ at bay.
All this is standard analysis, I don’t know if you read the precis of Chang’s work, but what I’ve outlined is not uncommon thought.
Trump/Putin is just the latest ‘crisis’, designed to distract from the latest means of wealth extraction.
As to the wealthy being in charge, you haven’t answered the very simple question;
If the wealthy are not in charge then how is it that the rules of the system are arranged precisely to suit them?
You have two options;
Luck
They exerted some power to ensure they are that way
The dissonance you’re experiencing is obvious in the fact that you can’t mount a sensible defence. You were quite happy to invoke ‘the elites’ to explain the failure of a proper socialist like Jeremy Corbyn because that was the story at the time - and I think you’re right.
All that’s changed is that Trump has invoked the ‘elites’, and because of absolute dumb tribalism it therefore must be wrong… because Trump said it, and literally everything he says we must think the opposite. It’s monumental stupidity (the process, not you personally), and serves no purpose but to protect from criticism those most responsible for the declining state of the world whilst they continue to cream off the profits.
I’ve presented ample evidence that this process is continuing uninterrupted.
I’ve presented expert testimony that the system is not just inevitable like gravity, but is specifically designed by humans to do this.
What you need to do, to defend you position, is explain how, then, the system is setup to facilitate the continued extraction of wealth, but is so entirely by chance.
During 1970-2023 was basically an era of globalization. Last time globalization took a dent was in the 1930’s. And the real example of “globalization” going back is how we got from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Large cities like Rome (or Constantinople) couldn’t be sustained once trade routes were cut. How the society coped with this was basically to go back to the countryside and have again feodalism and not anymore centralized governments.
If global trade is cut, you will literally not have the fruits of the international trade in your local supermarket. And if you think you don’t need them, well, it’s not just something excessive as exotic fruits. A lot other things go away.
Actually, deep recessions are the time when inequality can come down. And the rich just don’t get richer compared to the other population. In fact from the 1900s but especially from the 1960’s until the late 1990s the gini coefficient went down, the richest lost their share. Earlier before the 1960’s income inequality in Finland was basically similar as it is in the present US. Then (1950’s and earlier) basically there were agrarian people that were still subsistence farmers, hence basically very poor.
Here’s the gini coefficient of Finland from 1966-2020:
Ok, this is a West oriented view which totally dismisses the fact that global poverty has gone down as finally the emerging countries have developed with China and India being the most important examples. Growth has happened, but not so much in the West. In the start of the 1980’s China could be worried about feeding it’s population and possibly facing famine, while now obviously the country is far more prosperous. Globally absolute poverty has dramatically gone down.
But some Western observers don’t care a shit about this and just think about themselves and just their own country. Yet to see the whole picture is extremely important, as simply once markets have opened, then industry has gone where manufacturing and labour is the cheapest. And if areas in the West haven’t been capable of reinventing themselves, then they find themselves in a “rustbelt” or in region where many especially the younger people leave.
Again this isn’t so simple as there being just the banks and the workforce. No, here the problem is the fiat system itself: when you go to the bank and take out a loan, that money for a large part is then created (out of nothing). If the population would be rapidly growing then perhaps this perpetual cycle of more debt could be sustained for a while. But since populations aren’t growing, there’s a fundamental problem with our fiat system when the most natural reason for growth isn’t there anymore. And btw the current dollar based system creates the Triffin dilemma for the US.
Now, after Trump didn’t need allies and didn’t consult them at all, he is angrily demanding (or basically threatening) them to help with the mess he has created with this war as the straight of Hormuz is closed for Western shipping.
The blunt response from NATO allies just shows how the rupture is developing. If Trump demanded “about” seven countries to send ships, none have at least now committed to assist Trump. As German defense minister simply commented: “This is not our war, we have not started it.” Also the response from the UK government is telling as Starmer said that the UK “will not be drawn into the wider war”.
The British have for a long time announced having that “Special relationship” with the US, but likely Starmer has finally understood that this has been a one way street and the only special relationships that Trump has are with Netanyahu and Putin.
Of European countries France is already in the region and French fighters have been deployed to the UAE as France does have air and naval bases and personnel in the country. Also the UK has some fighters in the region and have sent one frigate to the area (the maximum they can do, likely).
Hence there is no coordination, which actually there wasn’t also much if any when the Houthis started to attack shipping close to their shores earlier. US does it’s thing, the European countries and the EU does another thing. The EU has still it’s Operation Aspides in the Red Sea/Arabian Gulf to prevent attacks from Houthis, and that might be something that EU is open to do. But as the Trump administration is openly hostile against the EU, that might not be what Trump would like.
The real consequences of this Trumpian do-it-alone-with-Israel actions is that then everything is quite uncoordinated.
If the oil shock becomes intolerable, then perhaps we will see some coordination. Yet this might be one small step increasing the rupture in the long run.
As I thought we don’t disagree on much, I just gave more emphasis in the effects of the current affairs and you less. I don’t see the point in arguing about this difference in emphasis. For both of us the current situation is symptomatic of the general malaise.
In principle yes, but my emphasis here is that this has become more toxic over the last 30, or 40yrs. But as you say, the flaw in the system was there all along and would inevitably become pernicious when other pressures began to bite. This pressure was exerted due to the under cutting of prices by the outsourcing of manufacturing to the Far East, over this period.
Yes, debt, financialization and crisis capitalism have been adopted, or come in, to remedy the economic problem here. But this doesn’t address the root cause of these problems. Surely some wealthy people with their finger on the pulse would have spotted the root cause and countered it. But they didn’t, they just jumped on the band waggon (to outsource to the Far East) for a range of reasons and made the crisis worse.
Alongside this there was the introduction of libertarian ideology into politics on the right, which was also going to be toxic to the economy. This ideology spread throughout the wealthy parts of society in English speaking Western countries(I haven’t included other European countries in this group as I don’t follow their economic developments). Introducing a flawed economic model (Thatcherism in the U.K.)to an already strained(see above) system.
So I’m not so sure the wealthy are all that shrewd, or in any particular way controlling the economy to the benefit of the economy at large, which would benefit them. But are happy to be mislead into exploiting and subsequently weakening the economy and ushering in populism and instability.
Do you realise that this kind of analysis is considered a conspiracy theory. I’m not critical of it myself as I am partial to a bit of that myself. So I’m open to the possibility, but I’m finding it difficult to identify a cohesive intelligent leadership, or a widespread group of wealthy people acting in concert. As opposed to what I was saying about a kind of economic gravity, or “trickle up” economics, that the wealthy naturally take advantage of, like an instinctive reflex.
I’m aware that there are rich actors (oligarchs, moguls etc) and corporations active in this arena, who do, or which do, act strategically. But this is a different thing from a whole wealthy class, or social strata acting in an intelligent way to pervert capitalism for their own purposes.
That’s an oversimplification, there is another alternative that it is human nature for people to take a financial win when it presents itself. Just like we have evolved to pick the ripe fruit on a tree. And that capitalism is by nature a system which advantages the members who know how to advance their relative position by capitalising on the luck of finding the ripe fruit first before their neighbour. This results inevitably in a class of the wealthy, who are in a privelidged (relatively) position in the society.
Yes, there are some people in society who do your point 2, but they are a small number of people who are involved in a more political, or professional economic role. As I said before, the majority of the wealthy are not involved in this activity. But they do play roles in a privileged imagined utopian society (the middle classes for example).
So who is “the capitalist”, who is manipulating the regulatory system etc, to benefit the poor?
I’m saying that the development of wealth and the advantages it endows are natural human behaviour. All economic systems allow this, because of the nature of the market. The only systems that don’t must be either socialist, or communist. Which are highly restricted forms of capitalism.
Indeed. I don’t see how this progresses the argument. The point is it hasn’t taken a hit as a result of the rise of populism.
Much like your tourism example. You’re clutching at straws. You’re supposed to be defending a claim about the collapse of the world order, not a drop in tourists and a lack of feta.
Cool. Show me. The data on inequality and the wealth of the richest 1% have been recorded for some time. Show me the drop during these times of recession.
No it didn’t.
The subject is Pax Americana, not Pax Norvegica. I’m sure Norway is doing better. The point was about Trump and the ‘world order’. Comparing Trump’s America to Norway tells us nothing. Compare Trump’s America to Biden’s America and you see nothing has actually changed.
The gini coefficient alone doesn’t tell us everything about the status of the wealthy because it can be affected by national wealth. That’s why I used the beta coefficient and 1% share.
Most European countries have 20-30%. It’s good that Norway dropped from high to low, but it doesn’t indicate anything structural changing.
Again, the subject of this thread is Pax Americana and the changes you claim Trump is bringing. Global decreases in absolute poverty are irrelevant.
But to tackle the claim. The reduction in global poverty doesn’t contradict any of the economic tenets I’ve put forward. Bringing some countries out of absolute poverty doesn’t somehow disprove the notion that Capitalism has a fundamental flaw relating to the fact that it needs to continually increase production whilst sultameously increase relative poverty.
We’re not now debating the general pros and cons of capitalism. This is a specific discussion about world order.
I don’t see how this address the issue. It doesn’t change the fact that the system is flawed, benefits the wealthy, and could be otherwise.
You mean like when Bush invaded Iraq?
Except…
… and …
… so basically responding, but with a gloss of diplomatic umbrige.
Woah! Add that to the drop in tourism and the difficulty buying feta… I see what you mean about a world-changing crisis!
Why? They’ve continued to get wealthier. Why would they change anything?
By whom was it introduced and by whom was it spread?
Then why are they still getting richer?
By whom? And to whose benefit?
Why? There are lots of wealthy people. There are a limited number of options which would benefit them. What do you find difficult to believe about the fact that they would all push for those options which most benefit them?
Why only the wealthy? Why can’t we all take advantage?
Then why is wealth invested in an increasingly small number of people? Are they the best?
CEOs of the major financial and industrial corporations. It’s really not complicated. Their job is to maximise profit for their shareholders. They exercise the power they already have to lobby for rules to be made that further favour them. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just basic people doing their jobs.
From your reply earlier when you addressed me and SSU together;
This illustrates where we differ, (although you seem to be coming around to something a bit more defined now). You have been lumping “the rich”, “the powerful” and a social strata who are wealthy into one amorphous group. Quite a large group, (although you say it is now getting smaller) and that this group is somehow controlling the system to result in the economic and geopolitical situation the world, or The West, is in, which benefits them. I’m asking who is in this group and how are they organised, such that they are exerting this control.
Now you are saying that this group is the CEO’s of major financial and industrial corporations. A very small group and a group that is presumably primarily concerned with the increase of profits in their particular corporation.
Getting back to your last post;
[quote=“Pseudonym, post:88, topic:203”]
Why? They’ve continued to get wealthier. Why would they change anything?
[/quote]Because by taking their eye off the root cause of the malaise, they weaken the position, or wealth of the country they’re in and if it goes down, it could take them down with it. It’s bad business sense.
It comes from people like Ayn Rand and was taken up by a group of Republicans in the U.S. Presumably you know about all this, so there’s no need for me to do the leg work now to lay it all out. It was seeded into UK and Australian politics in the 1970’s and 80’s. It became eventually the gospel ideology in the right of politics.
Because they are picking the low hanging fruit that the system puts in front of them. As I say capitalism, because of the market, advantages those who have capitalised on their position, or learned how to play the system. The only way to prevent this is hard socialism, or Communism.
Many people regard the idea that there is a hidden group, or influence hidden behind the scenes, or outward appearance. Which is actually in charge as characteristic of a conspiracy theory.
You’re equivocating, I’m focussing in on how the power structure within this large group of wealthy people operates, if it’s there at all.Is it a different power structure behind the scenes, rather than what we see outwardly, the public politicians and business commentators we see in the media?
Because, the poor don’t have the resources and the way capitalism works, you have to have the resources to invest in the market.
I’m not entirely sure this happening, although it does appear to be. Presumably this is symptomatic of capitalism turning toxic, as I think we already agree on.
Well if these are the rich, who are manipulating the system to benefit the rich. Then I agree, I did point that out in my last post. We seem to be in full agreement.
It was intended as an example of a control mechanism. They act on behalf of major shareholders, who are a much larger group, constituting almost the entire “wealthy” class.
But this is just idle speculation contradicted directly by the evidence. The rich do not get poorer as a result of the changes highlighted. They continue to get richer.
So you have no problem with a cabal of Republican politicians having enough power to influence world affairs?
You have no problem with a cabal
of ‘elites’ whom you were clear would have taken a Corbyn government down?
But a cabal of wealthy people doing any of this is conspiracy theory? This seems like nothing but apologetics for wealth.
Again, this is directly contradicted by the expert testimony. Economists, even of a centrist bent, do not hold to the notion that capitalism is some kind of natural force which the wealthy merely take advantage of. It’s a set of rules, which need not be that way.
I think, economically we’re just too far from one another to see any agreement. I don’t even consider myself particularly left-wing, but at some point there’s little I can say to someone like yourself so adamantly perpetuating extreme right-wing economic thinking. We may just be too much at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
It’s simple. CEOs act on behalf of shareholders (a group they are also members of), to increase the value of their assets. One of the main actions they take is to use the power they already have to;
ensure the rules by which the economy functions are in their favour, and
increase their power to do so again into the future.
The power they have by which to do this is is;
Over government, they exert power by controlling the government’s source of income (wages, economic production, direct lobbying).
Over the masses, they exert power via their control of their income (wages), and through their control of the media (through membership of the boards and advertising contracts), and by restricting their democratic options (by funding selected political parties).
This is not new information, it’s standard analysis.
What’s changed is the media’s representation of this view from ‘crazy radical leftist’ to ‘right-wing populist’. Nothing about the actual view has changed, and nothing about the media’s desire to dismiss it has changed. The same academics who espoused it twenty years ago espouse it today.
You don’t appear to. You appear to think Trump and Putin are in charge.
Yes, that’s fine, but can we say that “the wealthy are controlling capitalism”? When the shareholders only want one thing (I accept that there will be a group of leading shareholders who do attend shareholder meetings and have an imput in the governance procedures of the corporation), namely a good return of their investment. Also as I said, the goal of the corporation its self is primarily the maximisation of profits. Which is basically the same one goal that their shareholders have in mind. So having one goal, that never changes, namely profit, is not a very active process of control of the capitalist environment.
It’s not idle speculation, it follows a simple logic. If your one goal is the maximisation of profit, within a social, or commercial setting, then one of your ground rules is not to undermine the wellbeing of that setting, which might result in it’s collapse.
(I have not presented my personal opinion, preference, or political position on any of this.)
The three cabals you describe are quite different and the first two can be identified in the public domain. The third is notional, because it is assumed and is not identifiable in the public domain.Unless you want to identify it and its members?
What I’m getting at here is that there is a perception that the wealthy are somehow actively, through shrewd behaviour, extracting the wealth out of the society(perception 1)
But I’m pointing out that this might not be the reality, but rather while there is the same outcome, it is not actively being managed by the wealthy. But rather they are just taking advantage of an already existing system that they happen to be in(perception 2). The distinction being that in perception 2, the wealthy are not scheming in groups, or cabals about how to extract larger and larger amounts of wealth out of the society, as in the perception 1, but they are just living their lives in their own utopian worlds and taking advantage of the privileged position (able to buy shares, for example) they find themselves in within the system.
Capitalism is a market, you can’t get away from this, this is what I keep repeating. You can regulate it, or impose rules, but the only way to control the market such that the wealthy aren’t in a privileged position, within the market, is to have hard controls like strongly implemented socialism, or Communism. It is human nature to bend the rules and take advantage of regulatory frameworks and there are always ways of taking advantage of a market situation. I operate in a market, I know how they work.
I’m only looking for explanations for the economic circumstances we are in. My politics is quite leftwing, I’m a Green supporter, for me the environment is the most important issue, economics is secondary. But I am basically socialist regarding the economy.
I agree with your analysis here. I would note that this mechanism is all in the public domain.
Also what I’m saying regarding the prediction in the OP, namely that the U.S. economy is in a precarious position and could collapse, or follow a downward trend. Is that the control you are describing here can undermine the economy and cause it to fail. Such as to fail to counter the deleterious effects of globalisation.
Inequality decreased during the Great Depression. In the Finnish economic depression during the 1990’s inequality also decreased. This would be the natural effect of a deep economic depression. Of course it’s different, when you have “socialism for the rich”, that those (rich) who would fail are bailed out by the government. Which happened after the financial crisis in the US, where it seems that the highest priority is to keep the stock market prices high.
On the contrary, that’s the whole issue here!
Pax Americana was founded on the moment that the United States enjoyed it’s economic pinnacle of power: after WW2 all the other Great Powers were either bombed to rubble and had been part of the battlefield, or were in severe debt (like the UK) or had chosen the disastrous planned economic system of Marxism-Leninism.
The real change is exactly that China isn’t any more a dirt poor country, with a GDP smaller than the Netherlands (as was in the 1970’s) and doesn’t slavishly follow Marxist central planning. Similarly Asian countries aren’t anymore equally poor countries, that then after WW" were either under colonial rule or were just emerging from colonial rule.
This the era, when the US was one third of the global gross domestic production, has been over for a while. Especially after the dramatic rise of China.
And what does this actually mean? According to you, it’s just that the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer, but in reality it means that absolute poverty has gone down. Chinese aren’t being killed in famines like during the “Great Leap” and there’s years when even North Korea had it’s last great famine. If you would look at this from the global perspective (and not just fixated in your own country), you would notice this.
Yet it seems that you are just fixated on one narrative and focused just on the US (or your Western country)and disregard anything else as just “irrelevant”.
There are indeed large structural changes happening, and Trump is more like an accelerator of these events as the West would have been all too happy with the US as the lone Superpower. Things like Greenland have an effect. If you shake a coke bottle and open it quickly, you create a mess. That would be happening to the US in the long run irrelevant of who is in charge. Trump is just like a bag of mentols dropped into the coke bottle and then start shaking it.
We have focused on the NATO allies, but now the effects can be seen also in the Gulf allies and Asian allies of the US. Trump’s call to it’s allies didn’t get the response that the US hoped either from it’s NATO allies (especially not from the UK), Asian allies and surely afterwards the Gulf states have to think just how much security has the US given to them here. Especially Qatar, which was earlier attacked also by Israel in September 9th 2025.
Yes but the discussion is about whether that’s actually happening, not whether it’s hypothetically possible. Were it to be currently a risk, I strongly suspect the wealthy would interve. It isn’t, so they don’t.
It’s easily identifiable. The major corporate CEOs, board members and shareholders. Larry Fink would be an example, as would Jeff Bezos.
Yes, but you’re doing so contrary to the actual evidence. Of course it might not be the case, but it is.
You can call it what you like. The market is regulated by rules. Those rules can either favour the wealthy or not. There’s no ‘natural’ state from which adding rules is a deviation. The rules make the system run, without them there’d be chaos, not free-markets.
How would any corporation fare without the legal rule allowing incorporation? How would people trade without laws governing contracts? It’s all rules. Not a natural processes with rules added. The process cannot even take place without rules.
It really isn’t. The concept of free-market capitalism being a natural state on to which any imposition amounts to socialism is not even centrist, it’s strongly right-wing neo-liberal. You might want to be left-wing, but left-wing economics is at odds with the modern “elites are just a conspiracy theory” propaganda, and left-wing politics is at odds with the modern “it’s all the fault of the working class because they’re racist” crap.
These are tropes perpetuated by the media to prevent social progress. You’re repeating right-wing propaganda.
So, no then? You can’t show me. Some vague allusion to a hundred years ago and a single example that’s not from America (the subject of this thread).
You were previously arguing the ‘real change’ was Trump’s new foreign policy. Get your argument straight.
There’s no ‘but’ there. Both those things are true because absolute poverty and relative poverty are two different measures.
We’re also disregarding last night’s football results, and the outcome of the Boer war.
Unless you say why it’s relevant to the actual argument it’s pointless.
How does the fact that Asian countries have increased production and raised absolute poverty contradict what I’ve said about power structures, or support what you’ve said about Trump and the loss of Pax Americana? Just because a thing’s true doesn’t make it relevant.
Neither did Bush’s. You’re not making an argument for any radical change, just pointing to the US doing what it’s always done and the structural collapse of late stage capitalism.
Talk about strawman arguments: Finnish economic depression happened in the 1990’s. That’s not hundred years ago.
And for the Great Depression, then the stock market dropped approximately 89% from its peak in September 1929 to its lowest in July 1932 during the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from a high of 381.17 to 41.22 at it’s lowest and reached back to the 1929 high only in November 1954. And from 1929 to 1954, the inflation had been about 50% (hence one dollar in 1929 was equivalent to 1,5 dollars in 1954)
Now a simple question for you, @Pseudonym, who the fuck you think own the majority of stocks? Is it a) the rich people or b) the poor people?
If you answered a), good for you. For the rest, just why this then actually decreases income inequality, is up to you to figure out on your own.
Here’s another suggestion. Try to read my responses to the end and not go through them one sentence a time and then respond with the first thing comes into your mind. I’ve stated in the my response later here just what is role of Trump here, before throwing accusations.
Great, we agree on something. But notice that there is a difference with income inequality going up with a) absolute poverty decreasing or b) absolute poverty increasing. Hence if Elon Musk and Bill Gates would move to my country, income inequality would go up here. Still, that wouldn’t mean I would somehow get poor, even if I become instantly relatively poorer to the richest people here.
OK, this is a good question that advances our discussion.
The first issue, that these countries aren’t anymore colonies of Great Powers, but actors on the World stage themselves should be obvious. It’s quite different when there is Pakistan and India and not the British Empire around.
Then the fact is that these countries have become active actors on the global stage. This is especially true when you look at the conflicts in Africa. First Congo War 1996-1997 is many times referred to the “African World War” as many African countries backed the opposing forces and the US stayed quite passive in the conflict (and hence without the Western involvement, the large conflict is hardly mentioned).
The fact is that tiny Gulf States have now found out that money talks and have taken part in the great game of global politics what earlier was just for Great Powers were actors to. Just look at the Sudan civil war or the Libyan civil wars. The Yemen civil war is another issue, even if there is an earlier example of this in Yemen’s history. Still, in many conflicts you find the Gulf States and Turkey, Egypt active as regional backers of various sides. The void that the US retreating is being filled.
This means a huge difference to the prior era of the Cold War, when basically you had the two Superpowers choosing and sometimes switching their sides. Hence the multipolarization what many talk about is something that really has happened. This is a very crucial change to “Pax Americana”.
Yes, Trump can still brag about just how many “Peace agreements” he has made, but there isn’t the Superpower or Great Power control of Asia, Africa as was before. Where the US seems to attempt to continue it’s old ways is in Latin America.
So, one example from Norway and one from a hundred years ago. Exactly what I said. In what way is that a Straw Man? I’m literally describing the exact examples you gave.
The fact that you think Trump has a role is not in question. Evidence of its significance is. Emphasising the role of China undermines the role of Trump. They can’t both have the greatest effect.
Exactly. Elon Musk is not America. Nor is Bill Gates, nor is Jeff Bezos.
These people could just move and nothing about their proportion of the world’s wealth would change, nothing about their relative exploitation of the poor would change. Most of the people Jeff Bezos exploits to extract his wealth aren’t even American, they’re Chinese, or from the less developed South.
Countries just don’t matter anymore.
For someone keen to point out we’re no longer in the colonial era, you seem stubbornly fixated on a nineteenth century ethno-nationalism.
This has nothing to do with America, or Norway, or China, or India. These are fictions. Arbitrary lines drawn on a map. What matters are the structural economic relations between classes, those who control the means of production and those who don’t.
But this undermines the significance of the change, not emphasises it. It tells us that as the US retreats others will fill the gap such that the world continues on without so much as a stumble.
What does matter whose flag is on the bombs? Who cares whether it’s the Dollar or the Yen by which the Third World is in inescapable debt.
Yet the issue was, as you yourself pointed out, the difference between relative and absolute poverty and income inequality. The simple fact that you don’t seem to understand is that if the richest people either move out or lose their wealth in a stock market crash, income inequality decreases. I reason you do understand the cause and effect in the other way, when stock markets rise and create these multi-billionaires and create income inequality.
Lol.
Ah, the inability of the Western leftists to even relate anybody else than themselves and eagerness to find truth in Marx as they are simply so bored with their capitalism. You might think this way, which you obviously do, but many do not. There seems to be no curiosity for you to even think about others since they have to be stupid sheeple if they haven’t come to the conclusions as you have.
Yet for many Chinese China is real, as is India real for Indians, or Norway for Norwegians. But since you are disgusted about your country and it’s government, others have to be also. Or then they are morons, which you don’t care about. But countries and nation states do matter.
Thus it might be surprising for you why Ukrainians are still defending their country and fighting for years now for those “arbitrary lines drawn on a map” and just being “cannon fodder for the military-industrial establishment”. And if globalization and the important trade routes are taking a hit and crumbling thanks to conflicts in the Middle East, I assume that you will just want to hear a conspiracy how the rich people have come up with this and it’s all their plan, because they have the strings.
That some idiot US president was finally bamboozled to start a war with Iran isn’t what you want to hear. Nope, it has to be about class struggle, because that’s the important thing. Not something similar to Chaos theory with those butterflies called politicians causing hurricanes on the other side of the World.
It’s not dynamic, there’s only ever one message. The shareholders don’t say anything, because they’ve already said that one thing. The CEO’s do the lobbying etc, as you say, but they are only a small group and once they’ve done that a few times, there’s little point in repeating the message. Although giving influential parties money is always welcome, but is an inefficient way of controlling capitalism.
Either way, they only ever achieve the goal of maintaining business as usual. This is not control in any political sense.
This is lazy rhetoric, because it lumps a diverse group of wealthy into a group, or blob. It’s a much more complicated and incoherent group of people than that.
Actually oligarchs like that have quite different motivations. Take Bill Gates for example and philanthropic work he does. Whereas the mass ranks of the rich out there in the world keep their heads down and sit on their wealth enjoying their personal utopias.
Yes there are structural ground rules, but the wealth always trickles up at some point. Every country in the world has a wealthy class and a relatively poor class, whatever rules they have in place. However if we are talking of strong control as in socialist, or Communist countries, then it can be controlled to an extent.
I’ve already addressed this, I’m not talking about free market, or regulated capitalism. I’m talking about the fundamental principles of capitalism as a system within a population. The basic principles of how a market works.^
Just how rapidly all other NATO members, including the UK said “No” to Trump on his Iran war tells that all isn’t well in the alliance and about the rupture is now quite obvious.
That Trump’s talk about taking Greenland wasn’t treated as silly talk can be now verified from the fact that Denmark made preparations to defend Greenland from an US assault in January.
(The Guardian, 19th March 2026) Denmark reportedly readied itself for potential attack from the US in January – flying bags of blood to Greenland and explosives to blow up runways in case of a battle with its former closest ally. The 3 January US attack on Venezuela was a crucial turning point, many of the sources told DR. The following day, Trump said the US needed Greenland “very badly” – renewing fears of a US invasion. The following day, Frederiksen said that an attack by the US on a Nato ally would mean the end of both the military alliance and “post-second world war security”.
According to DR, there was already reportedly a plan for Danish and European forces to send soldiers to Greenland later in they year, but this was rapidly brought forward.
An unnamed top French official told DR that the unprecedented situation had brought Europe closer together. “With the Greenland crisis, Europe realised once and for all that we need to be able to take care of our own security,” the source said. Although Copenhagen wanted to avoid escalation with the US, it did not want to do nothing in the event of a US attack.
An advance command of Danish, French, German, Norwegian and Swedish soldiers touched down in Greenland, followed by a main force including elite soldiers. Danish fighter planes and a French naval vessel were also sent in the direction of the North Atlantic.
The aim was reportedly to have as many different nationalities of soldiers as possible to force the US to take a significant hostile action if it was to occupy Greenland. “We have not been in such a situation since April 1940,” a Danish defence source told DR.
By April 1940 refers to the time Hitler invaded Denmark.
Now some Americans might just laugh about Trump’s ludicrous attempts to take Greenland and brush off just what the above means to US-European relations. In Davos Trump looked like backing down, yet the Danes are still anxious about the issue.
General Jim Mattis anticipated in a great PBS interview few days ago (see here) that to repair the damage done to the alliance will take 12 years. I agree with the former secretary of defense. His remark that “nation with allies thrive, those without die” holds true. The stupidity of deliberately damaging your own alliances is a quite unbelievable expression of hubris.
The real issue that Europe cannot avoid is that Americans voted twice Trump into office and thus they are totally capable of electing a similar person to power in the future who will reurgitate the idea that Europe is freeloading and the US better without the slimy Europeans.
In this situation likely path for Europe is then hope and attempt to improve relations in order that the Atlantic tie will be repaired, but also prepare behind closed doors for the possibility that it is broken and Europe will have to have defend their continent alone.
This is quite similar to the “NATO Option” -model that Finland had prior to 2022: the country attempted to hold on to cordial relations economic ties with Russia (just like Sweden) as long it could be as it did clearly understand that Russia didn’t like the idea. Still, as Russia posed a genuine threat, the Finns came up with the “NATO Option” with the military transforming itself to the NATO standard take make that leap to NATO membership as easy and quick as possible, if it would happen. When Putin started to argue in late 2021 that Russia should have a say on any new members to NATO, the Finnish leadership understood that this was the time use the option. And when Putin assaulted Ukraine in 2022, the vast majority of the people wanted NATO membership and in the end Sweden and Finland, both lead by female social-democrat prime ministers, started the process to join NATO. And naturally the Finnish armed Forces, just like the Swedish armed forces, were totally ready for this task as they had prepared for this event for many years.
If Europe decides to follow a similar kind of 2-way approach, it will start building up especially on the areas where it is totally dependent on the US (satellite intelligence, strategic airlift). The fact is that it is totally capable to do this.
For NATO countries to show blind obedience as they did during previous decades, following the US unquestioningly into voluntary wars of aggression - that was the real sign of sickness.
I assume you refer here to NATO members other than the US. But I have to agree with you.
Still, let’s just remember NATO, just as CENTO and SEATO were designs of the Americans. When other treaty organizations failed, NATO has worked well as Europeans accepted the role of the US namely after their actions in WW1 and WW2.
Above all, NATO is a defense treaty. It’s objective is deterrence in order to keep peace. It has brought various nations together for them to depend on each other on this. That’s it’s strength. It’s success is that no NATO member has been invaded and no NATO members have gone to war between each other. It’s not an enforcement system as the Warsaw Pact system which worked well in squashing uprisings in member states. It’s a voluntary organization.
Once you imply that it has to do ANYTHING else, anything that isn’t defensive, you get into quagmires and difficulties. The worst possible thing to say is that “NATO is an old relic of the Cold War and it should transform itself to other missions of today (than deterrence and being a defense treaty)”.
