Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi)

🔒
❌ À propos de FreshRSS
Il y a de nouveaux articles disponibles, cliquez pour rafraîchir la page.
Hier — 28 mars 2024Vos flux RSS

Plucked Peacocks in Françafrique..

Par : AHH

Lost in the thunder of the two incendiary battlegrounds of the Ukraine and the Holy Land, the end of the western Age of Plunder is vividly demonstrated in the West African Sahel. Calm business arrangements are conducted with friendly states, even as the last US garrisons are dismantled, one by one.


💠 @Intel Slava Z:
⭕ 🇷🇺🇫🇷🇸🇳 SENEGAL: how Russia is destroying French neocolonialism

Historical events are brewing in another West African country, Senegal. Getting rid of the country’s neocolonial dependence on its former official metropolis – France.

Over the weekend, presidential elections took place here, in which the opposition candidate Bashiru Jumaye Faye is confidently leading (and may even win them in the first round, which will become known tomorrow), who, as part of his election promises, promised to review oil and gas deals with Western campaigns, including agreements with British Petroleum, Endeavor Mining and Kosmos Energy.

He also advocates a radical revision of relations between Senegal and France. And as part of this, Faye is going to follow neighboring Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso to leave the French currency system (by abandoning the CFA franc). And the French military will have to leave the country. By the way, sensing something was wrong, Paris had already announced a little earlier that it was sharply reducing the military contingent in the country (probably so that it would not be so shameful later). In return, he promises to take a course towards rapprochement with Russia.

Thus, France’s next major foreign policy defeat on the African continent looms on the horizon. Moreover, Senegal was a key player in the issue of the blockade of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, which had previously freed themselves from the influence of Paris. And the departure of Senegal from the CFA franc zone puts a final and fat cross on this system (which brought huge profits to France) and on which the entire system of French neocolonialism was essentially built.

And hence all of Macron’s current anti-Russian hysteria. He, like a plucked rooster, understands that he is losing to Russia and therefore becomes hysterical. And Ukraine for him is the last chance to spoil Moscow. But I think he will be disappointed here too.


💠 @Russian MFA:
⭕ 🇷🇺🇳🇪📞 President Vladimir Putin spoke over the phone with President of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland of the Republic of Niger Abdourahamane Tchiani, who expressed solidarity with the Russian people and heartfelt condolences over the numerous victims of the heinous terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall.

In discussing the bilateral agenda, the Leaders expressed determination to step up political dialogue and develop mutually beneficial cooperation in various spheres.

They also exchanged views on the developments in the Sahel-Sahara region with an emphasis on coordination of security and counterterrorism efforts. 

💠 @Sputnik Africa:
⭕ 🇳🇪 US will plan for the “disengagement” of troops from Niger after its military pact with Washington ends, Niger’s interior minister says.

The statement was published on social media after Mohamed Toumba hosted US Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon for talks.

A spokesperson for the Nigerien military said in mid-March that the country’s transitional government, which took power in a coup last July, ended the agreement with immediate effect, citing the interests of the Nigerien people.

💠@Africa Intel:
⭕ 🇷🇺🌍 Putin discusses security cooperation with West and Central African leaders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed security and economic cooperation with Mali’s junta leader Assimi Goita by phone on Wednesday, both countries said, a day after Putin held a similar call with the junta leader in neighbouring Niger.

“We discussed bilateral issues, particularly the security and economic areas,” Goita said. “We agreed to cooperate further in the fight against terrorism.” The Kremlin confirmed.

The call appeared to be part of a round of diplomatic exchanges Putin has made with West and Central African leaders since his re-election earlier this month.

The Kremlin said on Wednesday Putin and the leader of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, had agreed in a phone call to deepen political, economic and humanitarian ties.

On Tuesday, Putin spoke by phone with Niger’s junta leader, Abdourahamane Tiani and discussed a need to reinforce their security cooperation, according to Nigerien state television.


💠 @Arab_Africa:
⭕ 🇺🇸 The US is worried that Niger will replace its military with Russian mercenaries

This was stated by the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers, at a hearing on the US military posture in the Middle East and Africa.

According to him, the recent expulsion of the US military from Niger may be linked to security talks with Iran and Russia that took place the day before.

“It looks like Niger will soon join Mali, Libya, Sudan, Mozambique and Burkina Faso in welcoming Russian troops and mercenaries into their country,” Rogers suggested. He also noted that China is at the same time seeking to expand its military presence beyond the PLA naval base in Djibouti.

“And they set up bases on the west coast to give the PLA strategic access to the Atlantic. China has already built and currently operates several major trading ports along the west coast of Africa,” the Republican reported.

Finally, Rogers warned that the US could lose the initiative due to inaction on the continent.

“Africa is of vital strategic importance to the United States. We cannot allow China or Russia to become their preferred security or business partner,” the American worries.
#нувыпонимаете
LOL


💠@Sputnik Africa:
⭕ “Atomexpo-2024,” the largest international forum on nuclear energy, was held on March 25-26 in Russia. Here are our publications not to be missed
🔸 Atomexpo-2024 nuclear industry forum breaks attendance record;
🔸 Rosatom signs roadmaps for developing cooperation on nuclear energy with Mali, and Burkina Faso and AlgeriaNOTE: the first two are members of the Sahelian Junta Belt..
🔸 “Russia will be able to better support Burkina Faso towards its energy independence,” a Burkinabe minister reveals details of the roadmap with Rosatom;
🔸 “Gold mined in Mali should be processed in Mali,” Malian minister of mines comments on the gold processing plant project with Russia;
🔸 Cooperation with Russia can help eliminate power shortages in Africa and advance Zimbabwe’s healthcare system, says minister;
🔸 Russia attracted Africans’ interest in nuclear energy because it’s a reliable partner, says a Rosatom official;
🔸 With the help of the agreements with Rosatom, Burundi intends to have a nuclear power plant that will help launch the country into industrial production, says a minister from the African country.

À partir d’avant-hierVos flux RSS

« Peur de quoi, selon vous ? »

Par : STRATPOL

Une conversation eut lieu, le 9 octobre 2006, sur les ondes de la radio France Culture, entre un animateur de

L’article « Peur de quoi, selon vous ? » est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

What is China’s Economic Future?

Par : AHH

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss what is actually happening in China’s economy, explaining its technological development and transition toward a new industrial revolution.

Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson at The Geopolitical Economy Hour.

Video:

Podcast:

Transcript:

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 24th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weiser.

And with us today we have, once again, Professor Mick Dunford, professor emeritus of geography at Sussex University and now working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, keeping a close watch, among other things, on China’s economy. So welcome, Mick.

MICK DUNFORD:  Thank you very much.

RADHIKA DESAI: So, China’s economy is what we’re going to talk about today. Where is it at after decades of breakneck growth, after executing the greatest industrial revolution ever? Where is it headed?

Trying to understand this is not easy. The disinformation that is fake news and even what I often call fake scholarship that distorts the view that any honest person may be trying to take on China’s economy is simply overwhelming. It’s absolutely wall-to-wall propaganda, no matter which Western publication or website you open.

If we are to believe the Western press and the leading scholarly lights of the West, who are the major generators of the Western discourse on China, we are at peak China. That is to say, they claim that China has reached a point, reached the highest point, that is, that it ever can. And from here on, it’s only going to be downhill, more or less rapidly.

They say that China has, in recent years, inflated a huge property bubble to compensate for the West’s inability to keep up imports. And this bubble is about to burst. And when it does, it will subject China to a 1980s and 1990s Japan-style long-term deflation or secular stagnation. They have even invented a word to talk about this: “Japanification”. We are told that the Japanification of China’s economy is impending.

They say that the U.S.’s trade and technology wars are hitting China where it hurts the most, at its export and its reliance on inward foreign investment. They are saying that China has grown only by stealing technology. And now that the U.S. is making it harder for it to do so, its technological development can only stall. They are saying that China followed disastrous COVID-19 policies, leading to mass death, draconian lockdowns, and economic disaster.

They are saying that China over-invests, and its growth will not pick up unless China now permits higher consumption levels. They are saying that China has a serious unemployment crisis, that the CPC, the Communist Party of China, is losing legitimacy, because it is failing to deliver ever-higher living standards. And they are saying that Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership is ensuring that the private sector will stall, and with it, so will China’s growth.

All this, they say, before even beginning to talk about China’s foreign policy. And there, of course, lie another long litany of alleged disasters and misdemeanors that China is responsible for, beginning with debt-trap diplomacy and China’s allegedly voracious appetite for the world’s resources.

The only reason why Western experts ever stress the strength of China’s economy is when they want to argue that the West must redouble its efforts to contain China and to stall its rise.

So today, we’re going to take a closer look at China’s economy, and in doing so, we’re going to bust a lot of these myths. We’re going to show you that, sadly, for the purveyors of the fake news and fake scholarship about China, no amount of their huffing and puffing has been able to blow down China’s house, because, like the good, the smart little pig, China is actually building its house with bricks.

So, we have a number of topics to discuss in this show. Here they are:

1.    Characterising China’s Economy: Capitalist? Socialist?

2.    Growth Story

3.    Covid Response

4.    The Alleged Debt and Property Bubble? And Japanification?

5.    Restricted Consumption? Stagnant living standards?

6.    Exports in the China Story

7.    China’s new growth strategy

8.    China’s foreign policy

So, these are the topics that we hope to discuss. We want to begin by talking about how to characterize China’s economy. Is it capitalist? Is it socialist? Then we will do the most important and primary basic thing, we will look at the growth story with some statistics. We will then look at China’s Covid response. We will look at the alleged debt and property bubble and whether China is being Japanified.

Then we will look at the issue of whether China is overinvesting and neglecting consumption and living standards, etc. How reliant is China on exports? What is China’s growth strategy? And what is China’s foreign policy? And are those myths about it true? So, this is what we hope to discuss.

So, Mick, why don’t you start us off with your thoughts on exactly how to characterize China’s economy?

MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the way I would characterize China is as a planned rational state. I mean, right the way through, it has maintained a system of national five-year planning, and it also produces longer-term plans. But it’s a planned rational state that uses market instruments.

China has a very large state sector. And of course, some people have claimed that this state sector is, in a sense, an impediment to growth. And we’ve seen a resurrection of this idea, guo jin min tui (国进民退), which is used to refer to the idea that the state sector is advancing and the private sector is retreating.

It’s a very, very strange concept, in fact, because the third word is min (民), and min refers to people. So, what they are actually, in a sense, saying – these ideas were invented by neoliberal economists in 2002 – the private sector is equated with the people, which I find absolutely astonishing. But, I mean, the country does have a very significant public sector.

What I find striking is that one can actually turn it around and say, what is it that these Western economists seem to think China should do? And they seem to think that China should privatize all assets into the hands of domestic and foreign capitalists. It should remove capital controls. It should open the door to foreign finance capital. It should transfer governance to liberal capitalist political parties that are actually controlled by capital.

I think one of the most fundamental features of the China system is actually that it’s the state that controls capital, rather than capital that controls the state. And it’s, in fact, this aspect of the Chinese model, and in particular, the rule of the Communist Party of China that has basically transformed China from what was, effectively one of the poorest countries in the world into one of its largest industrial powers.

So, in a way, it’s a planned rational state in which the CPC has played an absolutely fundamental role. And without it, I mean, China would never have established the national sovereignty that permitted it to choose a path that suited its conditions and to radically transform the lives and livelihoods of its people.

RADHIKA DESAI: Michael, do you want to [speak]?

MICHAEL HUDSON: The question is, what is the state? There are two aspects of the state with China. One is public infrastructure. And the purpose of China’s public infrastructure is to lower the cost of doing business because infrastructure is a monopoly.

That’s what really upsets the American investors. They wanted to buy the phone system, the transportation system, so that they could benefit from charging monopoly rents, just like under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The most important sector that China’s treated in the public is money creation and banks. Americans hope that American banks would come over and they would be making all the loans in China and benefiting from China’s growth and turning it into interest. And instead, the government’s doing that. And the government is deciding what to lend to.

And there’s a third aspect of what people think of when they say state. That’s a centralized economy, centralized planning, Soviet style.

China is one of the least centralized economies in the world because the central government has left the localities to go their own way. That’s part of the Hundred Flowers Bloom. Let’s see how each locality is going to maneuver on a pragmatic, ad hoc basis.

Well, the pragmatic ad hoc basis meant how are localities, villages, and small towns going to finance their budgets? Well, they financed it by real estate sales, and that’s going to be what we’re discussing later.

But once you realize that the state sector is so different from what a state sector is in America, centralized planning and the control of Wall Street for financial purposes, finance capitalism, hyper-centralized planning, you realize that China is the antithesis of what the usual view is.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And I’d just like to add a few points, which dovetail very nicely with what both of you have said.

The fact of the matter is that this was also true of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries when they were still ruled by communist parties. We generally refer to them as socialist or communist, but in reality, they themselves never claimed to be socialist or communist. They only said they were building socialism, especially in a country that was as poor as China was in 1949.

The leadership of the Communist Party of China has always understood that there has to be a long period of transition in which there will be a complex set of compromises that will have to be made in order to steer the economy in the direction of socialism, in order to build socialism.

So, from its beginnings, the revolutionary state in China was a multi-class state and a multi-party state. People don’t realize very often that while the Communist Party of China is the overwhelmingly most powerful party in China, there are other parties that exist as well, which reflect the originally multi-class character of China.

Now, it’s true that since 1978, the government has loosened much of its control over the economy. But the important thing here is that the Communist Party retains control of the Chinese state.

The way I like to put it is, yes, there are lots of capitalists in China. Yes, those capitalists are very powerful. They are at the head of some of the biggest corporations in the world, and they are quite influential within the Communist Party. But what makes China meaningfully socialist or meaningfully treading the path to socialism, let’s put it that way, is the fact that ultimately the reins of power are held in the hands of the Communist Party of China leadership, which owes its legitimacy to the people of China.

So, the reigns of power, the reigns of state power are not held by the capitalists; they are held by the Communist Party leadership.

So, in that sense, I would say that China is meaningfully socialist. Although, as Mick pointed out, there is a fairly large private sector in China, but so too is the state sector very large. And the extent of state ownership means that even though the private sector is very large, the state retains control over the overall pace and pattern of growth and development in the country.

And I just add one final thing here, which is going to become quite important as we discuss the various other points, and that is that the financial sector in China remains very heavily controlled by the state.

China has capital controls, China practices a fair degree of financial repression, and China’s financial system is geared to providing money for long-term investments that improve the productive capacities of the economy and the material welfare of the people. And this is completely different from the kind of financial sector we have today.

So, Mick or Michael, did you want to add anything?

MICK DUNFORD: Just to reiterate, I mean, the point is, the government sets strategic targets that relate to raising the quality of the life of all the Chinese people. And it has strategic autonomy, which gives China the opportunity or the possibility of actually choosing its own development path.

And I think that’s something that very strikingly marks China out from other parts of the Global South that have had much greater difficulty, in a sense, in accelerating their growth, partly because of debt and their subordination to the Washington financial institutions.

So I think that is critically important, the role of sovereignty and autonomy in enabling China to make choices that suited its conditions, and at the same time making choices that are driven by a long-term strategic goal to transform the quality of the lives of all Chinese people.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to put in one word about sovereignty. You put your finger on it. That’s really what makes it different.

What makes other countries lose their sovereignty is when they let go, how are they going to finance their investment? If they let foreign banks come in to finance their investment, if they let American and European banks come in, what do they do? They fund a real estate bubble, a different kind of a real estate bubble. They fund takeover loans. They fund privatization.

Banks don’t make loans for new investment. China makes great money to finance new tangible investment. Banks make money so you can buy a public utility or a railroad and then just load it down with debt, and you can borrow and borrow and use the money that you borrow to pay a special dividend if you’re a private capital company. Pretty soon, the country that follows this dependency on foreign credit ends up losing its sovereignty.

The way in which China has protected its sovereignty is to keep money in the public domain and to create money for actual tangible capital investment, not to take your property into a property-owning rentier class, largely foreign-owned.

RADHIKA DESAI: Thank you. Those are very important points. Thank you.

I’d just like to add one final point on the matter of how to characterize the Chinese economy and the Chinese state. At the end of the day, it’s not just important to say that the state controls the economy, but whose state is it?

The way to look at it as well is that in the United States, essentially we have a state that is controlled by the big corporations, which in our time have become exceedingly financialized corporations, so that they are directing the United States economy essentially towards ever more debt and ever less production, whereas that is not the case in China.

And the question of whose state it is makes use of the word autonomy. The autonomy refers to the fact that it is not subservient to any one section of society, but seeks to achieve the welfare of society as a whole and increase its productive capacity.

MICK DUNFORD: If I may just add, I think also it’s important that you pay attention to the policy-making process in China. It’s an example of what one might call substantive democracy. It delivers substantive results for the whole of the Chinese population.

In that sense, it delivers improvements in the quality of the lives of all the people, and therefore, in a sense, it’s a democratic system. But it’s also a country that actually has procedures of policy-making, experimentation, design, and choice and so on that are extremely important and that have fundamental aspects of democracy about them.

When Western countries characterize China as authoritarian, they’re actually fundamentally misrepresenting the character of the Chinese system and the way in which it works, because they, in a sense, merely equate democracy with a system, whereas China, of course, does have multiple political parties, but a system with competitive elections between different political parties. There are other models of democracy, and China is another model of democracy.

RADHIKA DESAI: Mick, you’re absolutely right to talk about the substantive democracy. Indeed, in China, they have recently developed a new term for it. They call it a “whole process democracy”, and it really involves multiple levels of consultation with the people, going down to the most basic village and township levels, and then all the way up the chain.

And I think this process does work, because the other remarkable thing about the CPC leadership is its ability to change direction pragmatically. If something does not work, then it assesses what it has attempted, why it has failed, and then it revises course. So, I think we will see several instances of this as we talk as well.

Michael, you want to add something?

MICHAEL HUDSON: One thing about democracy. The definition of a democracy traditionally is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. There’s only one way to prevent an oligarchy from developing as people get richer and richer, and that’s to have a strong state.

The role of a strong state is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. That’s why the oligarchy in America and Europe are libertarian, meaning get rid of government, because a government is strong enough to prevent us from gouging the economy, to prevent us from taking it over.

So, you need a strong central state in order to have a democracy. Americans call that socialism, and they say that’s the antithesis of democracy, which means a state that is loyal to the United States and follows U.S. policy and lets the U.S. banks financialize the economy. So, just to clarify the definitions here.

RADHIKA DESAI: Very, very true, Michael. But let’s not go, I mean, maybe we should do a separate show on political theory of the state, because that’s equally important.

But for now, let’s look at our next topic. We hope, of course, that everybody understands how we characterize China’s state. But now, let’s look at China’s GDP growth.

So, here you have a chart, and we have several charts on this matter, but we’ll take them one by one and comment on them:

gdp growth china west 1980 2028

So, here we have a chart showing the annual rate of GDP growth from 1980 to 2028. Of course, post-2023 are their projections, which are shown by the dotted lines. And I’ve only taken a few selected countries from the Our World in Data website, and anybody can go there and look at this data, by the way.

So, you can see China and then a handful of the most important Western countries. And you can see that going back to 1980, essentially China’s growth rate, which is here, the top red line here, has absolutely been massively higher on practically any year than the other countries.

In fact, you see I left Russia in here. I should probably have taken it out. It’s a bit of a distraction, because here you see Russia’s growth rate massively bouncing up from the late 90s financial crisis. But let’s leave that aside.

All the other major countries, which you see here, they are all showing considerably lower growth. So, the United States here is this orangish line. And essentially, they’re all showing much lower growth.

And more recently as well, this is the Covid-19 pandemic. And you can see that China, again, like all the other countries, it experienced a fairly sharp decline in the growth rate, but it still remained positive, unlike all the other countries.

And it remains substantially above that of the rest of the economies that constantly are telling China how to improve its economic policy. So, that’s what I want to say about this chart.

But Mick, go ahead.

MICK DUNFORD: Can you show that table that I sent?

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, sure. Yes, here we go:

gdp growth china west table

MICK DUNFORD: These are more recent growth rates for China, for the world, and for the G7. And I mean, first of all, they show absolutely clearly that China’s growth rate is still a long way in excess of the average growth rates of all G7 countries, many of which have actually performed abysmally. I mean, Germany is now in recession, it declined 0.3% per year this year. I mean, Italy has had extremely low rates of growth, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, all had extremely low rates of growth.

China last year achieved a growth rate of 5.2%. It itself expects to grow at 5% next year. The IMF forecast 4.6%. Even that 4.6% target is quite close to the average growth rate that China needs to achieve to meet its 2035 target. It has a 2035 target of doubling its GDP, its 2020 GDP by 2035. I think that that goal is perfectly realizable. And in that sense, I strongly disagree with people who argue that China has in a sense peaked.

But I do find it, really quite astonishing, that Western countries, whose economies have performed extremely poorly, feel in a position to lecture China about how it should address what is said to be an unsatisfactory rate of growth. That’s the first point I want to make.

I just want to say something else, if I may. When we talk about, I mean, China’s growth has slowed. And, there’s no doubt that in terms of people’s everyday lives, there are many difficulties. And I just want to quote something.

At New Year, Xi Jinping gave a speech. I wanted to cite his actual words. He recognised that in these years, China faces what he called the tests of the winds and rains. And then he said, when I see people rising to the occasion, reaching out to each other in adversity, meeting challenges head on and overcoming difficulties, I am deeply moved.

So, the leadership and all Chinese people are well aware that there are many, many difficulties and challenges confronted, because China is actually undergoing a major structural transformation about which we shall speak later. But China is also in the short term undertaking a lot of important actions that are actually designed to cope with some of the real difficulties that people confront.

So, if you listen to Li Qiang’s government work report, he addressed the problem of short-term employment generation. And there are proposals for 12 million new urban jobs to increase employment, especially for college graduates and other young people, because for young people, the unemployment rate, including college students, is in the region of 21 percent. Urban unemployment is 5 percent. So, there are issues to do with the generation of employment.

Government expenditure this year will target a whole series of strategic issues, but also livelihoods. So, affordable housing, youth unemployment, job security, insurance, pensions, preschool education, the living conditions in older communities. So, I’m just saying that, in the current context, difficult economic situation and a particularly turbulent global situation. I mean, China, as every other country in the world, faces challenges, and it is in many ways directly addressing them in very important ways.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. Thanks, Mick. Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, I think that’s it. The question is, what is the GDP that is growing? There are a number of ways of looking at GDP. And when I went to school 60 years ago, economists usually thought of GDP as something industrial. They’d look at energy production. They’d look at railway cargo transportation.

If you look at the industrial component of what most economists used to look at, electricity is the power for industry, electricity is productivity growth for labor. If you look at these, what is the component of GDP, you realize that these differences in Mick’s charts are even wider than what he showed, because the American GDP, very largely interest, overdraft fees of credit card companies, as we’ve said, is providing a financial service. 7% of American GDP is the increase in homeowners’ view of what their rental value of their property is. That’s 7%.

Now, I doubt that China includes a measure like this in its GDP. But if it did, with all of its rise in real estate prices, its GDP would be even higher in a reality-based basis.

So real GDP, as we think of it, and the public thinks of it, is something useful and productive. Actually, China’s doing a much more efficient job in minimizing the kind of financial and rentier overhead that you have in the United States.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly, Michael. What I was going to point out as well is that these figures of U.S. GDP growth and the absolute level of U.S. GDP are heavily financialized.

The financial sector, which actually is not a force for good in general in the U.S. economy, it is out of which the indebtedness comes, out of which the productive weakening comes. The growth of the financial sector is counted as GDP in the United States and massively inflates U.S. GDP, which would not be as high as this.

And this is particularly important given that President Biden, for example, is congratulating himself now for having the strongest economy in the world or the Western world or whatever it is. Well, that’s what the U.S.’s boast is based on.

And China does not do that, nor does it have the kind of financial sector which creates, which destroys the productive economy. Rather, as we were saying, it has the kind of financial sector that supports it.

So, just another general point I want to make. We were talking about this chart:

gdp growth china west table

This shows from 1980 to 2028, and the projections remain, by the way, even from conservative sources, that China’s growth is going to remain higher than the rest of the world, particularly the Western countries, for a long time to come.

And I also decided to show you this chart:

gdp growth china west 2008 2028

This is the chart of growth, which is just a more focused version of the previous one, which shows growth rates from 2008 to 2028.

So 2008 is when we had what Michael and I call the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. And since then, what we’ve seen is, yes, of course, all countries have seen a sort of a reduction in their growth rate, and certainly China has. But even since then, you can see that China’s growth remains high and stable. So, that’s another thing that we wanted to show.

And this is a chart showing the rise of per capita GDP:

gdp per capita growth china west 1970 2021

That is to say, you can have a higher GDP, but if your population is expanding, then to what extent is per capita GDP rising? So, you can see here that, again, even in terms of per capita GDP, and this only again goes to 2021, but in terms of per capita GDP, China has remained head and shoulders above all the major Western countries.

And this bounce here that you see in the case of the US and the UK here, it is only a dead cat bounce from the absolute depths to which their economies had sunk during Covid, and so they came to some sort of normalcy.

Mick, you may want to say something about this chart, because you sent it to me. So, please go ahead:

gdp per capita ppp 2021 china west

MICK DUNFORD: It’s correct, of course, that China’s growth slowed. Now, in 2013, China entered what is called the New Era. At that time, China decided that its growth rate should slow. It chose slower growth. It spoke of 6 or 7 percent per year, and it more or less achieved that, until the Covid pandemic. So, China chose slower growth for very particular reasons, and I think in this discussion, we shall come to some of these reasons later on.

But in a sense, what they want is what they call high-quality growth. And what China is seeking to do is undertake a profound structural transformation of its economy, establishing new growth drivers by directing finance towards high-productivity sectors and directing finance towards the use of digital and green technologies in order to transform its traditional industries. So, in a sense, it’s undergoing a profound process of structural transformation.

And I mean, if you, for example, look at Li Qiang’s speech, the major tasks include invigorating China through science and education, so to strengthen the education, science and technology system, to improve the capabilities of the workforce, or promote innovation, industrial investment and skills, and another, striving to modernize the industrial system and accelerate the development of new productive forces, bearing in mind that we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution. But these are very important issues, fundamentally important issues.

RADHIKA DESAI: And I would say just, and I know we’ll talk about it at greater length later on, but it is really important to bear in mind that really, when the world stands at the cusp of being able to exploit new technologies like quantum computing or nanotechnology or artificial intelligence or what have you, a relatively centralized decision-making process about how to allocate resources, for what purposes, for what social benefits, etc., is likely to prove far superior, that is to say, China’s method is likely to prove far superior than the Western tactic of leaving private corporate capital in charge of the process.

And just to give you a couple of instances of this, the fact that private corporate capital is in charge of the development of digital technologies is already creating all sorts of social harms in our Western societies, whether it is harms to children’s mental health or even adults’ mental health, to political division that the algorithms sow and so on.

And also, it is leading to a situation where even these mega-corporations, these giant corporations, actually do not have the resources to invest, the scale of resources that will be needed to invest. So, for example, you hear in the Financial Times that Sam Altman is looking for people to invest in his artificial intelligence ventures, which will require trillions of dollars, and he cannot find private investors for it. So, this is really quite interesting.

Okay, so if we’re done with the growth rate story, oh, and I just want to say one other thing about this, which is, this is a GDP per capita in purchasing power parity, and China, in the space of a few decades, essentially, has experienced the biggest spurt in per capita well-being, etc., which includes important achievements like eliminating extreme poverty.

The Communist Party has brought China to essentially per capita GDP in purchasing power terms of next to nothing in 1980 to about $20,000 per annum in 2020. This is really quite an important achievement. And to do this for a country of 5 to 10 million people would be laudable, but to do this for a country of 1.3 billion people is a massive, historic achievement, and I think that’s something to remember.

MICK DUNFORD: I just, if you just go back for one minute, I mean, I absolutely agree with what you’ve just said, Radhika.

I’ll just make a comment about this chart. It’s because we were probably going to speak about Japanification:

gdp per capita ppp 2021 china west

It basically shows that the GDP per capita of Japan, and indeed of Germany, closed in on the United States, and actually Germany overtook it in the 1980s. But after that point in time, I mean, after the revaluation of their two respective currencies, and after the, the bubble, the stock market and property market bubble in Japan, you saw stagnation set in. And there’s a question as to whether that will happen with China.

But I mean, I think that one thing that’s striking in this diagram is that China is still at a much lower level of GDP per capita than Japan, or indeed Germany was at that time. And those economies, because, they were at the technological frontier to some extent, had to innovate, move into new technologies.

China, because there is still a technological gap, has enormous opportunities to accelerate its growth in a way in which, well, Japan failed because it chose not to take up opportunities, and it gave up semiconductors manufacture. But China has enormous opportunities, and that’s one reason why we must anticipate China’s growth as continuing.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Thank you, Mick. Okay, so if we’re done with the growth story, let’s go to our next topic, which is what happened in China under Covid-19. Now, of course, there is just so much dispute about and controversy around Covid and Covid strategies, etc. So we don’t want to get into all of them, but I just want to emphasize two things.

We’ve already looked at the growth figures, we looked at the growth figures around Covid:

gdp growth china west 2008 2028

So you can see here that in 2020, all economies had a big dip thanks to Covid in their economies, but China is alone among the major economies to have remained in positive growth territory, and to have, of course, remained much higher than the rest of the other major world economies. So essentially, China, whatever China did, it did not sacrifice growth.

Now, this is very ironical, because in the Western countries, we were told that we need to, in order to continue growing, we need to, so in order to preserve livelihoods, which was the euphemism for preserving the profits of big corporations, in order to preserve livelihoods, we may have to sacrifice some lives. And the Western economies went through an absolutely excruciating process of lockdown here, and opening there, and lockdown again, and opening again, and so on.

But all of this had devastating impacts on Western economies, whereas China prioritized the preservation of life above all. And it imposed a lockdown knowing that, okay, even if we are going to develop vaccines, and remember, China developed its own vaccines, and effectively inoculated over 70 percent of the population by the time they began reopening.

China prioritized the saving of lives, and it was accused of essentially creating world shortages by shutting down its economy, etc. But in reality, China’s strategy, which focused before the availability of vaccines, on essentially physical distancing, isolation, etc., as was necessary, but China managed to do it in a way as to keep up a relatively robust growth rate, and very importantly, lose very few lives.

This is a chart, again from Our World In Data, of cumulative Covid-19 deaths per million of population:

covid 19 deaths per million china us

So here we have all these countries, the United States and United Kingdom are these top two lines, Germany, Canada, Japan, even though we are told that East Asian economies did well because they had experience with SARS, etc., even then, compared to China, which is down here with a cumulative Covid death rate per million of about 149 or something people dying per million, and these numbers are over 3,000, almost 4,000 per million at this point in the United States and the UK, and then you have these other economies.

So China actually managed to avoid the worst of Covid, both in terms of lives and in terms of livelihood, and it did so because it did not compromise the saving of lives.

Does anyone else want to add anything? Mick? You were there.

MICK DUNFORD: Well, I mean, obviously, there were difficulties for some people in some places at some times. I was here right through it. All I can say is the impact personally on me was extremely limited.

It was a very effective system for protecting life. And if you lived in some places, then in fact the impact on your life, apart from having frequent nucleic acid tests and so on and ensuring that your health code was up to date, the impact on one’s life was relatively limited.

But in some places, obviously, in Wuhan at the outset, in Shanghai later on, the impact was very considerable.

But I think it’s an indication of the importance of a kind of collectivism, and the priority given to the protection of human life. And as you said, it is quite striking that actually through it, China’s economy actually kept ticking over.

And of course, China produces so many important intermediate goods that obviously it was also very important in providing things that were needed in many, many other parts of the world.

It also shared its drugs, its vaccines, which is really quite different, in a sense, from the conduct of the United States. And to some extent, the Western pharmaceutical companies.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Michael, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: In the United States, that would be considered a failure of policy. The United States used Covid as an opportunity to kill.

For instance, the governor of New York, Cuomo, took the Covid patients and he moved them into all of the assisted living and old people’s homes. And that had a great increase in productivity. It resulted in enormous death rates for the elderly.

That helped save New York’s pension plan system. It helped save other pension plans. It helped save Social Security because the dead people were no longer what America called “the dead weight”.

The American policy was to indeed infect as many people over the age of 65 as you could. And that helped balance state, local budgets, pension plan budgets.

The increase in the death rate is now the official policy of the Center for Disease Control in the United States. They say do not wear masks. They’ve blocked any kind of mask wearing. They’ve done everything they could to prevent the use of HIPAA filters or airborne disease. The Disease Control Center says that Covid is not an airborne disease. Therefore, do not protect yourself.

Well, the result is many children have been getting Covid and that weakens their resistance system. And they’re getting measles and all sorts of other things. And all of that is greatly increasing GDP in America. The health care costs of America’s destructive policy.

I think Marx made a joke about this in Capital. He said when more people get sick, the doctors and the economic output goes up. Are you really going to consider sickness and destruction and fires rebuilding and cleanup costs? Are you going to count all of this there?

RADHIKA DESAI: But the irony is Michael, even with all of that, America’s GDP plunged so deeply down.

Well, I think we should move on to the next topic, but I will just say one thing. It is generally said that China is in a panic, the Chinese government reversed its draconian Covid policies because there were popular protests, and blah blah and so on. I would not agree with that.

Certainly, there were some popular protests. It also seems as though at least some of them were being pushed by the National Endowment for Democracy with the typical color revolution style. They have one symbol that symbolizes it. So, they decided to put up blank pieces of paper, etc. So, there’s no doubt that there was some of this going on. And as Mick said, undoubtedly, there were local difficulties in many places.

But what becomes very clear is that China decided to lift Covid restrictions towards the end of 2022 only after it has satisfied itself that the risk. And I should also add one thing. It was under pressure to lift these restrictions a great deal because the fact was that the rest of the world was not following China’s footsteps apart from a handful of other countries. And they were socialist countries. They were not following China’s footsteps.

So, it’s very hard to be the only country that’s doing it. But nevertheless, despite all those pressures, China had a very deliberate policy. It lifted Covid restrictions after assuring itself that enough of the population had been vaccinated, as to achieve something close to herd immunity.

And these figures of deaths per million demonstrate that China’s bet proved right, and China continues to monitor the situation. Covid hasn’t gone away.

And so, in all of these ways, I think that it’s important for us to understand that China’s policy has actually been above all about protecting people’s lives.

MICK DUNFORD: Just from my recollection, the demonstrations of which you spoke, where the slogans were written in English, I wonder who they were talking to, were on the 1st of December. China had, on the 11th of November, already announced the steps of, in a sense, removing restrictions. And then they were finalized in early December. So, the change was already underway.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. Great. So, I think we are at almost, I think, 50 minutes or so. So, let’s do the next topic, which is the property bubble. And then we will stop this episode and we will do a part two of this episode, and do the other four topics that remain in part two.

So, Mick, do you want to start us off about the property bubble and the alleged Japanification, impending Japanification of China’s economy?

MICK DUNFORD: Okay. Well, if you want, you can just show the chart:

house property prices china us

Basically, you can see that throughout this period, Chinese house prices have risen quite substantially. You know, in a sense, the story started, with housing reform, after 1988, when China moved from a welfare to a commodity system. And then, in 1998, it actually privatized Danwei housing, and it adopted the view that housing should be provided, as a commodity by developers.

And in 2003, that course of action was confirmed. And from that point in time, one saw very, very substantial growth in the number of developers, many of which, the overwhelming majority of which were private developers. So, in a sense, they moved towards a fundamentally market system.

And they very quickly had to make certain adjustments because they found that while the quality of housing and the amount of housing space per person was going up, these developers were orienting their houses towards more affluent groups. So, there was an under-provision of housing for middle-income groups and for low-income groups.

And so, there were progressively, you saw over the years, increasing attention paid to the provision of low-cost housing and of low-cost rented housing. And in fact, in the current five-year plan, 25% of all housing is meant to be basically low-cost housing.

So, the important point is that this problem emerged in a system that was liberalized, actually, I mean, in line with recommendations that were made in 1993 by the World Bank.

So, in other words, it’s an example of a liberalized, predominantly market-led, private-led system, in which these difficulties and these problems have emerged.

So, that’s the first thing I want to say. And I mean, obviously, to address housing needs, China has had, over the course of time, to considerably move back in the direction of providing low-cost housing in order to meet the housing needs of the Chinese people.

But basically, in August 2020, the government got very, very deeply concerned about, on the one hand, increasing house prices and, on the other hand, the explosion of borrowing and the fact that the liabilities of many of these developers substantially exceeded their assets.

And of course, the other line on that chart is a line indicating house prices in the United States. And of course, it was the crash of prices in the subprime market that, in a sense, precipitated the financial crisis. So, China, in the first place, is absolutely determined that it should not confront that kind of problem that was generated by the liberalized housing system in the United States.

So, I mean, that’s the first thing I basically want to say.

If you want, I can say something about the case of Evergrande. But basically, what China did in 2020 was it introduced what it called Three Red Lines, which were basically designed to reduce financial risks.

But it had a number of consequences because it, to some extent, deflated the housing market. Housing prices started to fall. Some of these developers found themselves in a situation where their liabilities substantially exceeded their assets. There was a decline in housing investment.

But to some extent, I think this is a part of a deliberate goal of basically diverting capital towards, as I said earlier, high productivity activities and away from activities, especially the speculative side of the housing market. So, I’ll just say that for the moment, but I can come back and say something about Evergrande, if you wish, in a few minutes.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, great. Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what I’d like to know as the background for this is what is the, how much of this housing is owner-occupied and how much is rental housing? That’s one question. The other question is how much is the ratio of housing costs to personal income? In America, it’s over 40% of personal income for housing. What’s the ratio in China?

I’d want to know the debt-equity ratio. How much debt, on the average, for different income groups? Debt relative to the value of housing. In America, for the real estate sector as a whole, debt is, the banker owns more of the house than the nominal house owner, whose equity ratio for the whole economy is under 50%.

These are the depth dimensions that I’d want to ask for these charts, if you know anything about them.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, thanks for that. And so, I just want to add one thing, which is that, this graph actually really says it all, and in some ways implicitly answers Michael’s questions:

house property prices china us

Because the blue line, which shows the United States property prices, you can see that they reached a certain peak at 150% of the value of its 2010 values in 2008. Then it went down to below the level of 2010.

But U.S. monetary policy, Federal Reserve policy, its continuing deregulated financial sector, the easy money policy that was applied in a big way with zero interest rate policies, with quantitative easing, etc., etc., has simply led to a new property boom, where the prices of property prices have reached a peak, which is even higher than that of 2007-8, which was such a disaster. And this was all made possible precisely by the, by increasing housing debt, etc.

Whereas in China, a big driver of the housing boom has actually been that people are investing their savings in it. So, by logically, it means that the extent of a debt in the housing market will be comparatively lower. The entities that are indebted are actually the developers.

And that’s a very different kind of problem than, than the, than the owners being indebted. So that’s the main thing I want to say.

And Mick, you wanted to come back about, about Evergrande, so please do. And then remember also that we want to talk about this chart in particular, and deal with the question of Japanification:

china loans real estate industry

So, please go ahead, Mick. Let’s talk about that.

MICK DUNFORD: Okay, well, I mean, as Radhika just said, the problem is, the indebtedness of developers, and the existence of debts that considerably exceed the value of their assets.

And the way in which this situation has come about, and I mean, as I said, the Chinese government, in a sense, wants to address the financial risks associated with that situation, and did so by introducing these so-called Three Red Lines.

It also is interested in reducing house prices, and it’s also interested in redirecting finance towards productivity-increasing activities.

So, Evergrande is an enormous real estate giant. It has debt of 300 billion dollars. It has 20 billion of overseas debt, and its assets, according to its accounts at the end of the last quarter of last year, are 242 billion. And 90 percent of those assets are in mainland China. So, its liability asset ratio was 84.7 percent, and the Three Red Lines set a limit of 70, 70 percent. So, it’s substantially in excess of the red line.

In 2021, it defaulted. And then, in January this year, it was told to liquidate after international creditors and the company failed to agree on a restructuring plan. In September, by the way, last year, its chair, Su Jiayin, was placed under mandatory measures, on suspicion of unspecified crimes. Basically, it was a Hong Kong court that called in the liquidators.

And the reason was that, in a way, outside China, Evergrande looked as a massively profitable distressed debt trade opportunity. There were 19 billion in defaulted offshore bonds with very substantial assets and, initially, a view that the Chinese government might prop up the property market.

So, large numbers of U.S. and European hedge funds basically piled into the debt, and they expected quite large payouts. But it seems as if this negotiation was, to some extent, controlled by a Guangdong risk management committee. And the authorities, basically, were very, very reluctant to allow offshore claimants to secure onshore revenues and onshore assets.

And, in fact, to stop the misuse of funds, I think about 10 Chinese local provinces actually took control of pre-sales revenues. They put it into custodial accounts, and the idea was that this money should basically—the priority is to ensure that the houses of people who’ve paid deposits on houses are actually built, and people who’ve undertaken work in building houses, are basically paid. So, that, then saw the value of these offshore bonds collapse very rapidly, indeed.

And I think that, to some extent, explains the concerns of the international financial market about the difficulties of this particular case. But I think, it’s clear that China intends, basically, to deflate this sector and to put an end to this speculative housing market as much as it possibly can, and to direct capital, towards productivity increasing, essentially, the industrial sector. And we shall talk about this direction of finance later on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Evergrande debt, and other real estate debt, is to domestic Chinese banks and lenders. Certainly, many Chinese home buyers did not borrow internationally.

So, I want to find out how much the domestic Chinese banking system, or near banking system — not the Bank of China itself, but the near banks intermediaries who lent — to what extent have the banks given guarantees for the loans for Evergrande and others?

I understand that there are some guarantees domestically, and if the banks have to pay them, the banks will go under, just as occurring here in New York City. Do you have any information on that?

MICK DUNFORD: No, I don’t really have any information, except, I mean, some of the literature that I’ve read suggests that these creditors, bondholders and also other creditors, basically shareholders, are going to take a very, very major haircut.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. I think that this is the key, that there will be an imposition of haircuts on the rich and the powerful, not just subjecting ordinary people to repossession of their homes, which they should have access to.

So, as Mick has already said, the Chinese government is doing everything possible to make sure that the ordinary buyers who have bought these houses do not lose out, which is the opposite of what was done in trying to resolve the housing and credit bubble in the United States.

So, I just want to say a couple of things. I mean, the Chinese government is quite aware, as Mick pointed out, the whole thing has begun by, this whole property bubble is in good part a product of the fact that when relations between China and the West were much better, China accepted some World Bank advice, and this is partly a result of that and the kind of deregulation that the World Bank had suggested.

But very clearly, now relations between China and the West are not good. In fact, they’re anything but good. China is unlikely, once bitten, twice shy, to accept such bad advice again, even if they were good. And now that they’re not good, there will be, and China is clearly looking at distinctively pragmatic, socialistic ways out.

And you see in the new address to the NPC by the Premier [Li Qiang], that social housing has become a major priority, not building houses for private ownership, but rather building houses which will be kept in the public sector and rented out at affordable rates. And I think this is really an important thing, really the way to go.

And finally, I would say that, the property bubble in Japan and the property bubble in the United States were bound to have very different consequences, partly because, well, for two reasons, mainly. Number one, the nature of their financial systems were very different.

In the case of Japan, the financial system was being transformed from one that resembles China’s financial system to something that resembles much more the US financial system. And Japan has continued this transformation and has suffered as a result. I would say in short, really, Japan has paid the price of keeping its economy capitalist. So in many ways is the United States.

And the second reason, of course, is that, funnily enough, one of the effects of the Plaza Accord was that, by the time the Plaza Accord came around, Japan was no longer interested in buying US treasuries. And as a result, the United States essentially restricted its access to US markets in a much bigger way. And so, essentially, Japan lost those export markets.

And it did not do what China is able to do. It perhaps could not do what China is able to do, being a capitalist country, which is massively reorient the stimulus for production away from exports and towards the domestic market, including the market for investment.

So I think that we are, maybe this is the cue at which we can talk about Japanification. So maybe you can start us off by commenting on this chart, and then Michael and I can jump in as well:

china loans real estate industry

MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the blue line, of course, is the flow of loans to different sectors. So the blue line is the flow of loans to the real estate sector.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Only the Bank of China or by?

MICK DUNFORD:  All the banks. You can see from 2016, the share going to real estate has diminished very significantly, whereas, where it says industrial MLT, that’s medium and long term loans for industrial investment, you can see a very, very strong, steady increase in the share of loans going to industrial investment. In agriculture, it declines. And then also, that has actually increased since 2016. So this is a directing of investment towards manufacturing and towards the industrial sector of the economy.

So why is that? Well, I think the first thing one can say is that, in the past, basically, the growth drivers of the Chinese economy were, to some extent, export manufactures. But China was predominantly involved in processing activities, employing very unskilled labor and associated with very low levels of labor productivity.

So one of China’s goals is to significantly, basically, strengthen, upgrade the quality of these traditional industries, to make them digital, to make them green, and to radically increase productivity through a large-scale investment wave.

And then, secondly, we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution, which Radhika has spoken about. So the aim in this case is, basically, to divert investment towards the industries that are associated with the next industrial revolution.

The other main growth drivers in the past, alongside this export sector, were obviously real estate, which, I mean, if you look at GDP by expenditure, was accounting probably with household appliances and furniture and household goods and so on, about 26, 27 percent of the economy.

But it’s a sector that’s associated with relatively low productivity, and of course, it was associated with very substantial speculation and generated very considerable financial instability.

So, as Radhika said, there will be, in dealing with this financial crisis, basically an underwriting of existing, of obligations to existing home buyers, and in the future, an attempt to establish a more sustainable housing market.

The other area of the economy was basically this sort of platform economy. But this platform economy was associated with very, very strong tendencies towards monopoly, and in the, about four or five years ago, a series of measures were adopted, basically, to restrict, some aspects of this platform economy, and other areas, like private tutoring, which was generating large disparities in the educational system, and is associated with the fact, that the cost of raising children in China is extremely high. I mean, it’s the second highest in the world after South Korea, actually.

So, these growth drivers, these old growth drivers, are basically seen as not offering potential to sustain the growth of the Chinese economy into the years ahead, and so there’s this attempt to look for new growth drivers. And basically, for that reason, you’ve seen this redirection of investment.

And I think one can distinguish that, from what happened to Japan, because basically, in Japan, industrial investment did not increase, largely, I think, because the profitability of investment was not sufficiently high. And also Japan, in a sense, adopted a neoliberal program. It didn’t implement industrial policies.

Whereas China is seeking to undertake this transformation, basically, through, it’s a kind of supply-side restructuring, driven by industrial policy, and driven by financial policies, providing strategic funding for industrial transformation.

Then linking that also to the transformation of education, to try to ensure that the output of the education system, in terms of skill profiles, and so on, corresponds much, much more closely with the profile of work and employment, with much more emphasis upon STEM, in the context of this new industrial revolution, radically raising productivity, and by radically raising productivity, you increase income, and ultimately, you’ll increase consumption, and so on.

So I think that the Japanification course is not one that China will follow, that China will actually address this need to innovate and transform its industrial system, in order to, in a sense, address the problems that are associated with the earlier drivers of Chinese development.

MICHAEL HUDSON: We probably need a whole other program to talk about the difference in structure. Real estate is the largest sector of every economy, and China is so different from Japan.

The Ginza district in Japan, right around the palace, that small district, was larger than all of the real estate value in California. So, we’re dealing with a huge debt finance explosion there, and then you have the largest collapse of property prices in Japan, everywhere, anywhere in the world.

In a way, what you’ve described brings us back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show, about China’s structure. The effect of the real estate slowdown and falling in prices has a disastrous effect on localities, small villages and towns in China, who are dependent on real estate sales as funding their budget.

So, the real estate crash in China, if we’re talking about what policy is China going to take, how is it going to solve the problem of local budgets without solving it by creating a booming real estate market for towns to sell off their property to developers, and developers to make a profit selling off a property to private buyers, mainly.

I assume they’re not just selling it to the government to make a profit. I think there’s a lot of structure that I’d like to know. I don’t know what it is now, but it’s so different from what you have everywhere else.

I think that really is what I hope will be the focus of our show, the geopolitics of different real estate structures and the real estate tax that goes with it.

RADHIKA DESAI: That’s a really interesting question, and much of that we will be discussing in the second part of this show, which we’ll be recording in a week or so, I think.

But let me maybe then just bring this to a conclusion by simply agreeing with what both of you have said, which is that China has a very good chance, in fact, very likely, China is not going to follow the Japanification model because, as Michael is emphasizing, the structure of China’s economy and the imperatives generated by that structure are very different.

To name just one, if something is not profitable in a capitalist economy, it will not get done. Whereas in the case of the Chinese economy, the Chinese government can always say, well, if it’s necessary, we’ll do it even if it isn’t profitable, because it is necessary for the welfare of the people or the productive capacity of the economy, etc. So, profitability just does not play the role of a brake in the same way as it does in capitalist societies.

Secondly, the role of the state, both in terms of initiating new projects and taking responsibility for new projects, and we can already see in the current NPC and the discussions there that the role of the state is already once again expanding again in China, and it can continue to do so. And I think that’s a very good thing.

And remember also that, Mick, you emphasized in the case of when you were discussing one of the graphs, that the per capita GDP of China today is considerably lower than what it was in Japan, even in the late 80s and early 90s.

And that means that, number one, domestic consumption can be a big stimulus for further economic expansion. And secondly, of course, the industrial opportunities, the opportunities for a new industrial revolution are many, and China in particular, because of the important state role in the Chinese economy, the centrality of the state role in the Chinese economy, and the aim of the Chinese economy and the Chinese economy’s managers to develop China’s productive capacity in whatever way that works, not necessarily through private ownership.

These elements are actually going to ensure that China will exploit the opportunities of the new technologies much more effectively and execute a transition to the next industrial revolution much more successfully, and that will be an important road to avoiding what’s called Japanification.

MICK DUNFORD: You know, I think the difference is that Japan, I thought, in the 1980s was at the technological frontier, and China is not. But just, what Michael was referring to is the fact that in China, local government revenue came to depend to a very considerable extent on what is called land revenue.

You know, basically all land is state-owned, is either state-owned or owned by the rural collectives. But what happened was that if land was converted for use for urbanization, was converted for use for urbanization, for housing, then basically the local government could in effect sell leases, 90-year leases, or depending on the activity, different lengths of lease. They could sell these leases to developers. And then that revenue was used by local government to fund infrastructure.

To some extent that model has come up against limits. And I think, the issue Michael raised really concerns how in future will local government be funded, and will there be a reform in the system of taxation?

Will a property tax be introduced in order to generate government revenue rather than relying upon this land tax? Because of course that did encourage local government to allocate that land to people who are going to build housing for upper-income groups, because the implications for land value were under that situation, they would actually be higher rather than providing that land to construct housing for low income groups.

So, this issue of land revenue is one that has to be addressed basically by someone who’s an expert in public finance.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That should be what we talk about in the next show, I think.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. So I think that we should bring this part of the show, the first part of this show to an end. And let me just do that by going back to our list of topics.

So just to conclude, we managed to cover the first four, although the question of Japanification and the alleged property bubble will resonate into all the rest of the topics, certainly the question of consumption, exports and China’s new growth strategy. So we will return to it.

But in the next [Geopolitical Economy] Hour, we will be talking about these topics, restricted consumption, exports, new growth strategy, and of course, China’s foreign economic policy.

So thanks very much both. Thanks to all the listeners. And we look forward to seeing you in another week or two. Thank you and goodbye.

African Observers of Russian Presidential Elections

Par : AHH

Those who travel to Russia and see the reality for themselves, from any part of the world, are consistently astounded and pleased with what they see. This consistent discrepancy between reality and media-driven myth underlines the potency of the mindwashing western Big Lie Media, which most of humanity continues to foolishly imbibe.




Visiting Russia is a key antidote, until the Global South / Global Majority drops safeguards against western media, referred to as “informational hygiene” by Russians. Otherwise Forever Wars are permanently baked in as this Big Lie Media forever sews discord, false impressions between natural allies, and works to divide humanity along false lines.

An interesting pattern developed during yesterday’s first of three main voting days. Let the following 11 African election observers from 10 different African countries tell you in their own words. The selections are from the Sputnik Africa Telegram channel.

International observers for the Russian presidential elections plan to visit at least 52-53 regions, they will be provided with all the necessary assistance, said the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova. Currently 333,600 people are monitoring the Russian presidential election, including over 700 from 106countries,” Pamfilova noted.
The process of voting is “proceeding normally,” she added.”

💠Everything you need to know about Russia’s 2024 presidential elections

Russian citizens will head to the polls on March 15-17 to vote in 2024 presidential election. There are 112.3 million eligible voters inside Russia, and around 1.9 million eligible voters reside abroad. Voter turnout is expected at 71%, as per the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM).

What’s new about 2024 elections?
E-voting, a remote electronic voting system, is being used for the first time to elect a Russian president. Voters in 29 Russian regions will be able to cast their ballots remotely.
🔹Electronic ballot processing system uses a special scanner to read and process marked paper ballots and tally the results.
🔹Mobile Voter mechanism provides online voting.
🔹Elections state automated system is information software that ensures that ballots are counted in an accurate and rapid manner.

There are four candidates vying for the top office:
🔸Self-nominated candidate and incumbent President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin;
🔸Communist Party nominee Nikolay Kharitonov;
🔸Liberal Democratic Party nominee Leonid Slutsky;
🔸New People party nominee Vladislav Davankov.

Who will observe the voting process?
🔸Election observers are Russian citizens who monitor compliance of election procedure with the law, supervise the process and record possible violations.
🔸200 parliamentary international observers have been accredited to monitor the elections in Russia, delegations from 36 countries are already arriving.

👉 Follow this link to learn more

≈≈≈≈≈≈

💠A Kenyan observer for the Russian presidential elections, who’s watching the voting process in Russia’s city of Perm told Sputnik that “the election process has started well” and “the election officials are well set”

“It’s very cold, [but] I am very happy to be here,” he added.

💠Fast and secure procedure: a Burundian observer appreciates the advantages of voting electronically in the Russian presidential election

“When I was told what happens electronically, I congratulated you, I saw that you had succeeded,” President of the National Assembly of Burundi, Honorable Gelase Daniel Ndabirabe, told Sputnik Africa.

Ndabirabe noted that once a person is identified in the system, the voting process takes “very little time,” adding that such an option saves “a lot of time and energy” for people.

Lastly, the observer praised the excellent security of the electronic voting.

“I was told that to date there have been no complaints about the security of the electronic trial. Which is another great success, because that’s what’s so frightening. I say: “congratulations”. Because there can’t be any hacking. That’s a very good thing,” Ndabirabe concluded.


💠Cameroonian observer speaks about Russian presidential election. African observers who are inspecting polling stations across Russia will return home genuinely satisfied with what they have seen, Serge Espoir Matomba, the first secretary of the Cameroonian United People for Social Renovation, told Sputnik Africa.

According to him, at a time when “the world wants to be multipolar, we have an obligation to know what’s going on without waiting to be told what’s going on. There is this growing misinformation that is being used today as a lever for manipulation.”

“That is why I am in Moscow today, to see with my own eyes how the elections are going, how the buzz around the elections is going, how the process itself is being set in motion,” Matomba said.

“The image that Africa has often had of Russia in the past is changing exponentially,” the politician concluded. “Africans are now realizing that Russia is not the country they were presented with. And that’s a good thing.”

💠 An observer from Kenya in the Kherson region praised the Russian electronic voting system

“In Russia you can vote from home. In other countries, especially in African countries, with electronic voting you have to go to the polling station to register,” said Ezekiel Kanagi Mutes.


💠 “Absolutely fair”: Ethiopian observer impressed by Russian presidential elections

“Really, it is well planned, well organized. I have seen the voters, how they are electing. As to my observation up to now, it is absolutely fair. I appreciate it,” Dr. Petros Woldegiorgis, an observer from Ethiopia and President of Bonga University, told Sputnik Africa.

He particularly noted the accessibility measures in place, including the option for citizens in distant locations to vote via telephone—a novel experience for him.

“The general feeling I have is wonderful,” the observer remarked. “From Alpha to Omega, what I have seen now, honestly speaking, I’m very much excited.”

💠 🇷🇺🗳🇹🇿 “Very open and freely”: Tanzanian observer from the ruling party on the Russian presidential election

“The voting process here is very interesting. […] It takes very small time, just 3 to 5 minutes you are done, is very open and freely,” Joseph Mgaya told Sputnik Africa.

Furthermore, the observer pointed out that Russian citizens are voting “freely” and they can do it in every corner of the country – you just need to have an ID with you.

Mgaya also praised the “high-end” online voting technology that simplifies the whole election process.

“I’m very interested in it because it’s high-end [and] […] it’s very open,” he added.


💠 “The process is more than transparent”: Comorian observer on presidential elections in Russia

The Russian presidential election has a number of advantages, including security cameras to ensure transparency, candidate representatives at each polling station, “a more efficient electronic system combined with a reliable manual system,” Ahmed Said Mdahoma, head of the Independent National Electoral Commission of the Comoros, told Sputnik Africa.

He also noted “maximum” security to ensure the calm of the electoral process and “constant communication at the level of the Central Electoral Commission to inform citizens, observers and actors about the electoral process.”

In addition, Mdahoma emphasized a 3-day voting period that would allow “everyone who wants to exercise their right to vote to find the right time” to do so.


💠 Chairman of CAR National Electoral Commission praises organization of Russian presidential elections

Mathias Moruba visited three polling stations in Russia and noted their compliance with international electoral standards, the Russian Embassy in the Central African Republic (CAR) said.

According to the embassy, the delegation from the Central African Republic arrived in Russia to observe the presidential election at the invitation of the Russian Central Election Commission.


💠 “Russia is already ahead,” says Madagascan observer on electronic voting in Russia

Russia’s presidential election is taking place “calmly and also within the norm,” which has highlighted some advances, such as automated voting, which saves voters’ time, Ralaisoavamanjaka Andriamarotafikatohanambahoaka, the first general rapporteur of Madagascar’s Independent National Electoral Commission, told Sputnik Africa.

“The computerized system is a novelty. The whole world will choose this system. The choice of the virtual system, which the majority of people will make, is mainly to save time for them,” the observer explained.

He added that “it’s obvious that we’ve respected the principle of electoral sovereignty and the electoral norm in Moscow and Russia in general.”
[His name is not a typo!! Another example here.]


💠🇷🇺🗳🇦🇴 “No violations”: an observer from Angola about the Russian presidential elections

“We didn’t find any problems, no violations. [Everything went] very well, without problems. And everything was peaceful,” said Manuel Camati, member of the National Electoral Commission of Angola.

He also noted that elections are part of the sovereignty of each state, and therefore it was important for him to be personally present in this process.

Speaking about the technological innovations of the Russian elections, Camati said that they help to quickly resolve any issues, and the electronic voting option allows “to minimize the number of errors and speed up electoral processes.”


💠🇷🇺🇲🇱 Voting in Russia “proceeding normally, as in other countries,” says Malian observer

The ability to vote electronically is important for people who cannot travel, such as the disabled and the elderly, Nana Aïcha Cissé, the first vice-president of Mali’s Network of Women Parliamentarians, told Sputnik Africa.

She came to observe the elections in Russia for the first time and said she was impressed by the organization.

The observer also called Mali “a friend of Russia,” noting that “people know Russia, they know the ties that exist between Mali and Russia, and that’s very important.”

Biden: ‘No Red Line’ as Israel to Invade Rafah

Par : AHH

The U.S. President is doubling down on his support for Israel, claiming that “there’s no red line,” as Netanyahu has made it clear that no form of international pressure is going to convince him to pull back from plans to invade Rafah.

Veteran Journalist Elijah J. Magnier noted that as Israel prepares for a ground invasion that is putting around 1.5 Million Palestinians—the majority of whom have already been forced to flee their homes—at risk, the U.S. is fully in support, knowing that the goal is to fulfilling Israel’s ultimate plan of forcing the Palestinian population out of the Gaza Strip for good.

🔹Elijah J. Magnier on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ejmalrai
🔹Rachel Blevins on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RachBlevins

The Reality of Bidenomics

Par : AHH

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss the rhetoric and reality of Bidenomics, and how good US President Joe Biden really was for the economy.

Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson at The Geopolitical Economy Hour

“what is Bidenomics? It’s a slogan for a war economy, financed by a financial bubble.”

Video:

Podcast:

Transcript:
RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 23rd Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you this show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weisser.

2024 is being billed as the greatest election year in history. More than 50 countries are going to the polls, that’s 7 out of its 10 most populous countries, with a combined population of 4.2 billion, that is more than half the world’s 8 billion population.

Among these, for good or ill, one might add, the US election will be the most consequential, deciding life and death questions such as how much war the world will witness, how well its economy will do.

This is not because the US is a force for peace and development. On the contrary, it’s been weighing down on the prospects of peace and development for decades. Of course, the formal choices before the US public promise to change little, though a worsening on both fronts is entirely in the cards, no matter which of the two main contenders on the scene at present win the election.

But will they even, will either of them win the election because there are so many uncertainties around this election? Will Biden run? Can Trump run? If not they, then who will represent this increasingly divided country?

And if no one can, is civil war a possibility that has been canvassed in practically every major news outlet on the cards? And what will civil war in the US mean for the rest of the world?

All these questions are part of the story of the 2024 elections. These are the circumstances in which they are being held.

Biden’s approval rating is only 38%. Indeed, it had dipped into negative territory by August of the first year he took office. And since then, they have only gotten worse.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what does the public see that Biden and his supporters are not recognizing? That’s really the question that I think we have to talk about today.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. And what is the public seeing and what is the public experiencing to give him these negative ratings? Biden’s one hope was to unite the country behind him through good economic stewardship.

After all, it was James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, the guy who helped reshape democratic politics in the aftermath of the Reagan electoral earthquake, who said, it’s the economy, stupid. You can’t win elections without a good economy.

And you can’t say Biden hasn’t tried. He’s even ponied up a new term: “Bidenomics”. We are told that this is going to solve the US’s deep-seated economic problems.

And certainly his Bidenomics has included considerable sops to the biggest US corporations, the idea being that somehow this is going to induce them to invest, although it is not clear what sort of quid pro quo had actually been set up. And nor is it clear that they’re actually investing even after receiving these sops.

The pro-Biden establishment, of course, has picked up this term and run with it. They’re trying hard to set up an election year narrative that under Biden, the US economy has done very well, Bidenomics is working, and it has moreover achieved that miracle of miracles, a soft landing, by which is meant that it has slain the dragon of inflation without inducing a recession.

However, their job is not easy, and the holes in the story that they’re trying to weave together are widening.

So Michael and I thought it would be a good time to do a 360-degree check on the US economy, and we want to do it by going through a number of major topics.

We’ll talk about employment, we’ll talk about the investment situation, the trade situation, the real story about inflation in the US, because it’s not so clear that the dragon of inflation has been slain, the problem of financial stability, and finally, of course, the issue of the budget. So these are the topics we are going to go through.

But before that, before we go through these topics, we must begin with a contrast. On the one hand, the stock market is soaring.

Let me just show you a few of the stock market indices here.

This is the S&P, so Standard and Poor 500. You can see it is at the highest point it’s ever been in its history.

S&P 500 February 2024

This is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, similarly at a peak.

dow jones february 2024

And the NASDAQ is, if not at a peak, at a peak pretty close to its previous peak.

nasdaq february 2024

So you can see that all the stock markets are doing really, really well. But Michael, does this mean that the US economy is doing well?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it certainly means that there is a tech bubble and a war industry bubble. But let’s look at all the things that are increasing. Since your chart, not only are stocks going up, but when stocks go up, economic polarization increases, because most of the stocks are owned by the top 10% of the population.

So economic polarization is increasing as wealth is concentrated at the top of the economic pyramid. And a lot of voters see this as unfair.

So to say that the stock market and the 1% are doing well is not really a good political selling point, unless you can convince people that, well, you can be a capitalist in miniature.

You can invest your pension funds in the stock market, you can invest your savings, and maybe you can get rich just like the billionaires.

How do you get them to think of themselves not as wage earners, but as stock market investors? If you can convince voters to think that they’re finance capitalists instead of wage earners, you’ve got a good selling point.

But let’s look at other things that are up: Crime is up. Shoplifting, robbery, phone and internet scamming. I’ve already got my morning internet scam call.

Rents are up, utilities are pricing, and food outside the home is pricing. I think we’ll get to these charts later. There we go:

food spending share disposable income US

Basic food, eggs. All of a sudden, people are having to pay more, whether they’re eating at home or whether they’re buying the food at the stores.

Everybody’s noticing the prices are rising and the packages are getting more and more empty. You’ll get a box of cornflakes and a lot of it is air now.

RADHIKA DESAI: It’s called shrinkflation. Prices go up and what they sell you, the quantities go down.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. Exactly.

Housing is also basically up. When housing prices are up, you also get homelessness up.

Taking the subway in New York, you’ll see a very crowded subway car, and then all of a sudden, you’ll see cars with hardly anyone in it, and that’ll be a homeless person that maybe hasn’t had a chance to take a bath for quite a few days. You’re seeing that already.

RADHIKA DESAI: If I may just interject, this is the percentage of households who spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

households spending 30 percent housing US

Overall, 30% of all US households are spending more of their housing, but among renters, this ratio goes up to 50%, while among owners, it is 21%. You can see that those who are wealthy and relatively better off who own their own homes are penalized less than those who are relatively worse off.

You see here, again, another really shocking statistic. This chart goes back to 1960.

house price median household income ratio US

You can see that the ratio of house prices to the median household income went down after the 60s and remained low right into the 1980s, but from about 2000 onwards, basically coinciding with the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve, house prices as a proportion of median income has risen, and although they again fell after the 2008 housing bubble burst, they began rising again, and today they are even higher than they were in 2008.

MICHAEL HUDSON: The situation is actually much worse than that chart says, because not only have housing prices gone up, but the mortgage rates have gone up. They’ve doubled from about 3% to almost 7%.

Now, if you have a mortgage, you want to buy a house, you don’t want to be a renter, you want to escape from being a renter, you buy a house, and your mortgage has to be 7%.

That means the entire price of the house, the mortgage that you’re paying, doubles in 10 years, and if it’s a 30-year mortgage, it doubles again and it quadruples in 20 years and multiplies eight times by the end of the 30-year mortgage, so that the bank will get eight times as much for the house you buy as the person who sells the house to you.

The mortgage rate and the debt attached to the house is expanding even more rapidly than the housing prices.

That’s what debt deflation is, and that’s part of why the economy is being malstructured.

So what voters are seeing is not simply the economy’s getting worse, but the whole way in which it’s structuring and the direction it’s going in, financialization and the whole neoliberal plan makes them want to throw the rascals out of office.

RADHIKA DESAI: Indeed, the approval ratings figures are showing exactly that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, what they’re disapproving of is the economy above all, and people say, oh, it’s just because Mr. Biden’s getting senile. Well, it’s not that he’s getting senile, it’s that he’s a nasty, bad person running a nasty, bad economy. That’s really the key.

We haven’t even mentioned the medical costs going up for people who have lost their jobs or they have to stay home because of COVID. There’s a whole COVID effect of the economy. Long COVID is a problem that isn’t being counted. A lot of people are having to take part-time jobs.

So what you’re seeing is a kind of crapification of the economy. You mentioned that about the prices that we’re seeing. A whole new vocabulary is being developed to describe what’s happening in the economy, and shitification, the whole bit.

So let’s look at what hasn’t increased. Maybe there’s a bright spot there: well, lifespans have not increased, and health generally has gone way down.

You have a reversal in the whole post-war rise of lifespans. They’ve gone down. They’ve gone down especially for people who earn less than $50,000 a year. For non-white people, they’re turning down. Wages have been turning down.

The Financial Times last week had a story that wages are growing more slowly for employers working at home because employers want to see them in the office.

And yet what they’ve found in your country now, England, is that workers from home, the productivity is going up even faster than workers who actually have to go to the office and sit on the long transportation train to get in, whether it’s London or New York.

So the Financial Times said this is a success story. Employers gain in both ways. The workers get to stay home, and they’re more productive, but you’re paying them less for the right to stay home.

RADHIKA DESAI: And you’re not paying for all those offices. We’ll come back to that as well. But shall we go into our discussion of the various topics now?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure.

RADHIKA DESAI: So the first topic we wanted to discuss was employment. So on the employment front, recently, as many of you will have seen, the Biden administration is making much of a report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reports that 350,000 new jobs were created in the previous month. However, there are huge problems with that.

First of all, let me just show you the story, the official story that the Biden administration would like to emphasize. So this is the official unemployment rate that is shown on the Federal Reserve website:

official unemployment rate US Biden

And you can see this chart also goes back to 1950. And you can see that there have been various peaks in unemployment in the 1980s and again after 2008. And then unemployment went down.

And then, of course, this huge narrow spike is the COVID pandemic, when, of course, it hit nearly 15%, officially, at least. And since then, it has declined.

And so President Biden feels that he can pat himself on the back for bringing down the unemployment rate.

However, there are many, many other elements to this story, which are not being talked about. First of all, as opposed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, coming up with this number of 353,000 new jobs, a private payroll company, which essentially gathers, you know, basically, it knows who is paying whom, how much in wages, etc., what is the payroll of different companies, reported that only 107,000 private sector jobs were created, which is a very small amount.

And even if to this, you add the public sector jobs that are created, which will have expanded, because of Biden administration initiatives, nevertheless, it, you know, this would mean that if 353,000 new jobs were created, then job creation is being led by the government.

But at the same time, let’s also see something else, full time employment has fallen. That means, and this is, of course, been historically the issue, the United States always claims that it is such a wonderful job-creating economy. But few people point out that the bulk of the jobs that are created are part time jobs, they may even be zero hours contracts, and so on.

So, the actual quality, and of course, the kind of jobs there are, the benefits are low, the wages are low, etc. So, you essentially have an epidemic of McJobs rather than good-paying jobs.

Furthermore, this unemployment rate that I showed you is, unemployment rate is always calculated as the number of people who have failed to find work out of a total number, which includes those who are, those who are either working or actively seeking work. But it does not include those who have stopped actively seeking work.

And that number has actually … been going up for a long time, but it has particularly spiked in recent years.

So, in reality, the actual number of American people who are employed as a proportion of the labor force is going [down] … I want to show you the chart:

labor force participation rate US Biden

The labor force participation rate was fairly low, just below about 60% in the 50s, because of course, at that time, most women did not work. But beginning in the 1960s, as women began entering the labor force, the labor force participation rate began to go up, and it rose steadily through all those decades, up to about 2000, when you see this final little peak here. And since then, it has been in decline.

So, essentially, what workers are saying is that as neoliberalism has matured, as labor legislation, which decreased the onus on employers and essentially allowed employers to offer workers worse and worse jobs for worse and worse conditions and pay and so on, people who could choose to leave the labor force have been leaving the labor force, of course, we’re not even counting those who become disabled, particularly after COVID and so on.

But it has been declining, it declined massively during COVID. Since then, it has recovered, but it still remains short of the point it was at when COVID struck.

So, you can see that this is a relatively favorable story that the administration is trying to, is able to tell entirely because of this matter of labor force participation rates.

And finally, a couple of final points. Wage growth has been down for a year, particularly, as Michael was saying, for work-at-home employees. But the productivity is higher, so employers are gaining.

Workers’ insecurity is very high, and it is high precisely because they don’t have stable, permanent jobs. They have jobs that don’t last very long, that are part-time, that they hold at the whim of the employer. So, the traumatized worker syndrome still remains.

Back in the late 1990s, when Alan Greenspan was asked why, if the economy was running so, you know, the economy was running so hot, essentially, it was running so well, how come there was not more inflation? And he said it’s because of the traumatized worker. Workers are unwilling to demand higher wages, even though, according to him, the labor force, you know, the employment rate was very high.

But the simple reason was the workers were getting bad jobs, that they were getting insecure jobs. So, they were traumatized and insecure. They were unable to complain.

So, and finally, the quitting rate is very high, partly for medical reasons, but also because hospital workers, teachers, etc., do not feel medically protected at their job.

So, and according to the Biden administration, of course, COVID is over. So, these are some of the problems with this idea that somehow the Biden administration has given Americans a low unemployment rate.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’ve made all the points that I would have made, so I don’t have to make them.

I would like to see a chart for statistics they don’t collect: The employment by U.S. multinational corporations worldwide. Their employment in the U.S. may have gone down, but their employment abroad, especially in Asia, the maquiladoras along the Mexican border, their employment has gone up, but just not employment for their workers in the United States because it’s not really economic to employ American labor, given the rise in housing costs that we’ve just discussed, medical costs, and all the other costs that are going up.

America has priced labor out of the market, except for monopolies, especially artificial intelligence monopolies and military-industrial complexes. These are not competitive, so America doesn’t really have to do anything there.

You pointed to the structural shift in labor. It’s dangerous to go back to the office if they don’t have clean air and if you’re exposed to COVID, and the COVID rates continue to go up, and there’s nothing being done to encourage air purifiers or even the use of masks. You’ve made the points that I would have made.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay. There’s another couple of points, though, and Michael, I think you wanted to talk about pensions as well, but let me make one point here further, which is that there’s a very odd discrepancy in U.S. growth figures that is increasingly being talked about.

And that is that there are two measures of GDP. One is GDP, gross domestic product, and the other is GNI, gross national income, and very often these two are basically supposed to match. I mean, there were maybe some statistical discrepancies, but the first, GDP, which measures essentially how much value was made out of the production of goods and services, and the GNI, gross national income, which measures how much people earned out of that process, this discrepancy is essentially being put down to the fact that workers are not buying, workers essentially are not, you know, they’re not getting high wages, they’re not buying enough goods, and a lot of their income is actually replaced by debt.

And the second thing is that, in fact, a lot of the things that are actually being produced are not, in fact, being sold. So, both of these things are also problems

Michael, you wanted to talk about pensions on the employment.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, that’s the problem. Not only are the workers’ conditions getting poor, but pensions are no longer defined-benefit pensions, and many of the pension plans in the United States are actually broke.

Again, there was a Financial Times article last week that said that, Brooks Masters wrote, that the typical Generation X household has just $40,000 saved for retirement, and 40 percent of their 401k pension plans are zero. So, this is the result of not having a pay-as-you-go pension policy like Germany has and Europe has. Pensions have been financialized. In other words, instead of just paying out of the current economic surplus that you’re producing, workers and companies have to pay, save up money in advance instead of investing.

The post office, for instance, post office rates, postage prices in America are soaring because the attempt by Congress to privatize the post office means you have to include the pension plans for the next 75 years all in the price of your postage by saving it in advance, not hiring more labor, not improving the mail delivery, but just the turnover to the stock and bond markets to invest so you can pay pensions if there are any postal employees left.

Of course, the whole objective in increasing the public pension plans is to say, oh, I’m sorry, the post office and other public agencies are broke. We’ve got to privatize them. You privatize them, and what happens is what happened in England under Margaret Thatcher. You wipe out all of the pensions because there’s no company to pay them anymore.

Now, Peter Drucker called this pension-fund socialism before, because he said this is wonderful, workers and companies are going to pay for stocks, and that’s going to create financial wealth that’s going to be spent on new factories and new employment, and workers will be capitalists in miniature. Through the pension plans, they’ll be stockholders.

But the effect is simply to divert wage income into the financial markets, into the stock market. The pension system is a bonanza for the stock market and for bondholders because it’s financializing the economy, but it’s an awful noose for the workers who have to pay their own pensions instead of making pensions a public right like it is in socialist economies.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly, and if I may add a few points to this, this idea that the Peter Drucker idea that somehow you will get a kind of pension-plan socialism.

There’s a very interesting real-life example of this. In the 1970s in Sweden, thanks to a very high level of coordination between trade unions, governments, and employers, what had happened is that they had managed to create a fairly high-wage economy, a fairly prosperous working class, a very, very generous welfare state providing a whole range of services.

So then the question was, how would workers, whose wages will continue to increase thanks to rising productivity, what would be now done with the rising wages? What would they do? So they decided that they would create a wage earner fund, and the wage earner fund would slowly start buying up the stock of existing corporations for which they work, and slowly they would eventually become the owners of these companies, and that was the general idea. It was called the Rehn-Meidner plan.

And this plan was much discussed. Everybody thought it was great, but what immediately followed, beginning in the 1980s, was a major capitalist counter-offensive, an attack on the unions, which essentially meant that this wage earner fund plan was watered down to an extent that it became meaningless. And of course, today, in many ways, people would say that Sweden has gone from a Valhalla of socialism or social democracy to being a Valhalla of neoliberalism. So I did want to say that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to add a technical twist, and that already occurred in the 1970s in Chile under the University of Chicago guidance. You’ll have the Chilean companies found out how to do pension plans the neoliberal way. You do have the workers buy the stock in the company, but the company owner will also have a whole array of companies. They’ll have a holding company for the industrial company, they’ll have an offshore bank account to hold the stock in the company, and the company will continue to make basically loans to its holding company and be loaded down with more and more debt. It’ll borrow, borrow, and then the holding company, the actual industrial employer, will be left to go bankrupt. It’s a corporate shell, and all the money will have been taken by the holding company.

And so very quickly, Sam Zell, the real estate owner, did this with the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Tribune had exactly what you’re saying. We’re going to be part owners, we reporters and news people. And so Zell bought the Tribune, then he took all the money in the pension plan, lent it to himself and the holding company, and then said, oh, it’s broke, and wiped out all of the stockholders. I discuss that in my book, Killing the Host. That’s the pension plan finance capitalism.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. And this is exactly the reason why, as this is particularly true in the United States, one reads every few months, one reads that some or the other pension plan has essentially lost its money. And that means the workers who had put in their money, their hard-earned money into these financialized pension plans, essentially are getting nothing in return.

But there’s a couple more points to be made. First of all, when you financialize pension plans, workers are encouraged to think that somehow they are also becoming capitalists, that they have a stake in the stock market, et cetera.

Now, what really happens when our pension money goes into, essentially becomes privatized and is now being managed by some or the other private financial institution, is that our pension money just becomes so much throw weight that they can use in order to move markets in their favor. Remember, when you are speculating, if you are speculating with a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, you are a price taker, a market taker. But when you are speculating with millions of dollars and maybe even billions of dollars worth of money, you are a market maker, you are a price maker, which means that you essentially get to rig the system.

So, our money is used by these fund managers and so on as throw weight in their speculative activities. So, this actually increases speculation, it inflates asset bubbles, and it makes financial crisis, from which we all suffer as working people, more regular, more frequent, and so on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: The situation actually gets worse than fund managers. Because the pension plans are in deficit, the pension managers are desperate. How are they going to get more money? They turn the money over to private capital. And private capital is much worse than the pension fund managers. Private capital makes its money by buying a corporation and driving it bankrupt.

Private capital does to the U.S. economy what it’s done to Sears Roebuck, to Toys R Us. The company will borrow a lot of money from a bank. It’ll pay a special dividend to the private capital owners. The owners will immediately say, we’ve got the increased earnings, we’re going to cut back productivity. When workers leave, we’re not going to replace them. We’re going to work them harder. We’re going to give the traumatized workers syndrome with emphasis. And so, by workers thinking, I’m going to be a capitalist, just like the rich people, and my pension fund is going to make money for me as a capitalist. But making money as a finance capitalist means hurting their identity as a wage earner. What are they going to think of themselves as?

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, exactly. And so, definitely. And the other thing as well is that, of course, the companies that are brought into the control of private capital, these CEOs, etc., they borrow money in order to also, like Michael said, they certainly borrow money in order to pay huge dividends, but they also borrow money in order to engage in share buybacks, which increases the value of the shares. And all of this is being done on the backs of existing employees.

And of course, in doing so, they very often misuse and misapply pension funds so that they can go bust as well.

But my second and third point are equally important, which is that workers who think that they are participating in the stock market and therefore rising stock markets are good for them, etc., should always remember two things.

Number one, when markets go up, they may benefit, but they always benefit much less than the people who are controlling these markets, the big financial institutions and so on. They are very low on the pecking order of benefit from financial speculation.

And number two, when there is a loss, they lose much more than those who are controlling these pension funds, etc., who have their golden parachutes and so on.

So that’s about the employment situation. Now, let us look at the next point, which is what is happening with investment.

So here again, you know, we are being told that parts of the US economy are finally doing much better because investment rates are somehow better and so on. But let’s look at what’s really happening with investment.

So this is a chart showing gross fixed capital formation in the United States from 1970 to onwards:

gross fixed capital formation US 2024

And you can see that on average, if you drew a trend line in this chart, it would basically be pointing downwards. So basically throughout the neoliberal era, investment, which is in many ways the main driver of the economy, consumption is also important, but investment is essentially, you know, the more there is investment, there is the more growth there will be because investment itself creates growth and it increases productivity and growth.

So this has essentially been going down. This peak here is at the end of the 1970s. It’s going down. This is about 1990, going up again just with the tech bubble up here and then with the housing and credit bubble, but then essentially declining after 2008. Since then, it has risen, but as you can see, it remains below, in fact, even many of the low points of the previous 50 years, let alone the high points.

So and in the last couple of years of the Biden administration, these figures are only available to us for now up to 2021. But you can see that under Biden’s first year, it effectively took a downturn.

And let me also add one other thing, which is that investment is a proportion of GDP:

investment proportion GDP US

You know, the United States and the Biden administration make much of competing with China and so on. Let’s take a look at this graph. It only goes to 2015, but I don’t think the story has changed.

And this graph, by the way, is the work of my partner, my husband and intellectual partner, Alan Freeman.

And here you can see he has given investment as a proportion of GDP for China, which is this bold blue line, and for many other countries. But we just want to focus on China and the United States, which is the green line.

And indeed, as you can see, the green line is basically at the bottom of all these comparable countries, including Europe, Japan, other industrialized countries, and so on, and even the global south, which is here in this thin blue line.

So you can see if you’re going to compete with China in terms of growth and productivity and so on, China at its peak is spending 45 percent of its GDP on investment. By contrast, the US is spending less than 20 percent, less than half in investment. So this is the sorry state of investment in the United States.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Oh, it’s much worse than that. It doesn’t say how the composition of this investment has shifted. This re-rising of the US investment is largely military industrial. A lot of it is also real estate. That’s probably the largest element of a lot of this investment. And the real estate investment has been transforming the whole economy.

And that includes buying out existing companies. That’s counted as a new investment. If you buy a building that was at a low price before, buying it at a high price is a new investment. In London, for instance, you just had the sale of the British telephone phone tower last week to a hotel company. So it’s privatized. They’re going to essentially use that as a new investment. But it’s not building a new building. It’s just taking something over.

In the United States, you had the last few months, you had Greyhound bus terminals sold. That was an investment, sort of like Stagecoach in London. The company that bought Greyhound is a real estate company. They said, we’re going to tear down the terminals that are put in the center of the city. The reason they’re in the center of the city is so that they’ll be convenient for people who ride the bus. They can go to the terminal, have a place to sit, buy tickets. We’re going to make them go to the outskirts of the city and wait outside, regardless of the weather, because we don’t care about the users of our service. We want the real estate. So we’re going to essentially dismantle the public service investment and make a gentrified version out of this.

And in New York, you’re having the Wall Street area. All of these commercial office buildings in New York, there’s a 40% vacancy rate on commercial buildings. So companies are coming in to try to invest the company, saying, well, there’s no more industrial economy to put in these buildings. Let’s gentrify it for all the people who are getting rich on the financial sector, making money de-industrializing the economy.

Well, there’s one problem with this that they’re suddenly finding out. You can take an office building, a bank, or a publishing company, or whatever, and divide it into residential units, but where are you going to put the kitchens? These buildings are not geared to have gas and electricity and venting for kitchens. And what about bathrooms? If you look at how your employer is set up at a company, this is not the kind of bathroom that you’re going to want near a bedroom or living room for a residential person. So there’s an idea that somehow you can do to the commercial office buildings in America what President Obama did to Chicago before president when his job was tearing down black neighborhoods and getting rid of the low-income blacks and gentrifying them for his sponsor, the Pittsburghs, to make a real estate fortune there.

So fortunes are being made by real estate investment, not exactly industrial investment. Real estate is, again, part of the FIRE sector, finance, insurance, and real estate. You’re having investment in research and development. That’s called capital investment. You’re getting the picture that the investment that is taking place isn’t the kind of investment that originally helped an industrial economy. It’s a de-industrializing form of investment.

RADHIKA DESAI: And there’s also, I mean, well, gross fixed capital formation will actually measure physical investments, so that there’s definitely some physical investment taking place. But as we see, it’s much lower than China’s, it is not really recovering. And more to the point, if there has been any kind of recovery or whatever little investment is taking place, let’s put it that way, whatever little investment in actual plant and machinery is taking place under the Biden administration is happening in large part because of the sops he’s giving to industry via his Inflation Reduction Act and other such initiatives. So essentially, he is giving certain corporations money to invest in certain sectors. And this is why you are seeing it. So it’s the dynamo or the dynamic, the mojo of American capitalism is definitely not back. It is definitely very weak.

MICHAEL HUDSON: You mentioned the inflation and that act. One of the high points of it was advertised by Taiwan, taking its computer chip company, wanting, getting, I think, over vast billions of dollars to set up a computer chip system in Arizona. The people came up here and they say, oh, it’s not going to work. There are no workers. You know, you said that you were going to provide us with American labor to work in the investment plant, but there aren’t any American workers because they’re not trained as working industrially. You know, who are we supposed to hire as workers for our computer chip plant if you don’t have workers trained to work in computer chip plants or other industries?

RADHIKA DESAI: And, you know, that also reminds me, I mean, we haven’t even talked about this, but the state of public education, that is the education that most ordinary American kids get, has actually been declining to such an extent, as we know, for decades. You know, teachers will complain that they spend all their time trying to keep control of the classrooms. How are they going to teach kids anything? So if your kids are not learning what they need to learn, how are they going to become even semi-skilled workers, let alone skilled workers? So absolutely, I’m not at all surprised.

Some time ago, I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese companies that were being encouraged to invest in car plants in the so-called right-to-work states, these companies were having to produce the literature to minimally give instructions to workers using symbols rather than putting it in writing, because many of these kids were functionally illiterate.

But let’s go on, because we have quite a few things more to talk about, and we don’t want to go too much over an hour.

So very briefly, we said that we would talk about the U.S. trade deficit, and once again, vis-a-vis the trade deficit, the Biden administration is crowing about its great achievement.

trade deficit US Biden

You see here the U.S. trade deficit, which, of course, historically had been very [high]. That is, you know, in this graph, the higher the line is, the better the situation. So when the line dips, the deficit grows.

So you can see beginning around the 1980s and then really taking off in the 1990s, the U.S. trade deficit was quite, you know, dipped quite low. People were really worried about the so-called twin deficits and so on. And then after 2008, precisely because of the massive recession in the United States, the trade situation improved. The trade deficit actually narrowed. And this is also very interesting, you know, historically because of deindustrialization.

The United States has a tendency that when the economy grows, the trade deficit grows. Why? Because American consumers prefer buying foreign goods. So this has been the case for many decades in the United States. So obviously, with incomes shrinking, so did the trade deficit.

But once again, it resumed declining. And as you see here, in the Trump years and also in the Biden years, the trade deficit declined. You know, as you see, it reached a really, really low point already under the Trump administration. And it has recovered, but it still remains at historic high levels.

So in that sense, if there has been any improvement in the trade deficit, again, this is largely because of the sickness of the American economy, the poverty of American consumers, not because of any miracle that the Biden administration has executed or has brought off in the U.S. economy.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think the Biden administration has vastly helped the trade deficit. You know, what is Bidenomics? It’s a slogan for a war economy, financed by a financial bubble. And the State Department official, Victoria Nuland, just gave another plea for Congress to give a few hundred, a hundred million dollars for the weapons in Ukraine and Israel. And since our show focuses on geopolitics, I want to point out how war spending is contributing to the trade balance and also to American affluence against Europe’s NATO countries that America has just conquered economically.

Nuland picked up President Biden’s point that in reminding politicians that almost all the money for the war in Ukraine is going to be spent here in the United States, employing labor in the local districts of all the congressmen on the military and national security committees. That’s why war stops are going up. And it’s the merchants of death business.

And Biden is pretending to reindustrialize the economy by emphasizing how this military industrial sector is not subject to price competitiveness. You can do it with low productivity, high cost labor, because it’s a proprietary good. It’s an economic monopoly good for the weapons. Biden said, quote, but patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona, artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and so much more.

Well, these are the swing states in the election. And you have Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and the other Democrats recognize that the world economy is splitting up between the U.S. and NATO neoliberal countries called “democracies” and the global majority seeking independence. Well, it’s almost as if they’re channeling Rosa Luxemburg. She said the choices between socialism and barbarism. And Biden and Nuland agree, except what socialism is, what’s occurring in the global majority. Barbarism is what’s occurring in the American NATO militarization and the fight in Ukraine and the Near East.

But the fight in Ukraine has helped the U.S. balance of payments, the trade balance, by essentially forcing the NATO countries to impose the sanctions against Russia that we’ve talked about. The anti-Russian sanctions have broken the German industrial economy for good. And that’s why German companies, Mercedes, Porsche, BASF, are moving to the United States, because they can’t get the oil and the gas and the energy that’s needed to make industrial goods.

And what’s happening as a result? America is not buying European investments. America is replacing Russia as a supplier of gas, liquefied natural gas. That’s way up for the exports. Oil, way up. Basically, America is gaining.

And also, this $100 million, all these billions that NATO have given to Ukraine have emptied out their war stocks. And they now say, we have to buy new arms of up to 2% to 3% of our GDP. And who can make it? America can make it, because we don’t have any oil and gas to power the industry to make these stocks. This is going to be a huge, huge increase in the American trade balance while the euro goes down and down and down.

RADHIKA DESAI: If I may add, one of the things that I forgot to mention earlier is that a large part of the improvement in the US trade deficit under Biden in the last couple of years, particularly, has come precisely from the export of liquefied natural gas. So think about it. Instead of having some kind of serious industrial policy, the United States is once again an exporter of primary products like natural gas, an exporter of energy.

Two more quick points. You’re so right to emphasize that, you know, many people think that NATO exists to defend the West against all, you know, originally against communism, and then now against all these vague, you know, dictators and what have you.

In reality, the NATO exists so that the US military-industrial complex will have an export market because of NATO interoperability considerations. Essentially, when a country joins NATO, they become a captive market for the American military-industrial complex.

But there is one final point I’d like to make. You know, many, many decades ago, a couple of decades, maybe two or three decades ago, Madeleine Albright is supposed to have said, what’s the point of having such a vast and sophisticated army if you don’t get to use it? Because she was saying, you know, we should, of course, we should go to war if we want to, etc.

I’d like to paraphrase her on this. What’s the point of having a $1.5 trillion annually military-industrial complex if it actually cannot produce sophisticated weapons today? As far as technological sophistication is concerned, Russia and even China are further ahead of the United States. They can produce things like hypersonic missiles. They can produce electronic technology to fight wars that is far superior to anything the United States has.

So, this is another really interesting point, which is that the United States today can only get customers for its coddled military-industrial complex, which has become incapable of producing anything decent, when it essentially makes people join NATO and essentially convinces the governments of various countries to act against the interests of those countries. Because every country that is being brought into NATO on the premise that its security is going to increase is actually going to have its security decreased.

First, because, of course, NATO is increasing in security around the world. And second, because in reality NATO is not capable of defending these countries. It has deficient armies, it has deficient industrial and military production, and it has deficient weapons technology.

So, for all of these reasons, and the reason why the Russians and the Chinese are able to surpass the United States in terms of military technology is very simple. Yes, they have also in military industries, but their military industries and their armies are actually devoted to the defense of the country, not devoted to their own expansion for their own reasons. So, that’s another thing that I wanted to mention, that this is really in terms of the trade deficit.

But we also have three more interrelated things to discuss, which is what’s really happened on inflation, what’s really happening to the financial sector and financial stability, and what’s really happening to the budget deficit, and how are all these things interacting.

So, let’s take inflation first. What I’d like to say about inflation is the following. Throughout the last many months, the story has been that the Federal Reserve has managed to create a soft landing. We have vanquished inflation while not being in recession.

Now, Michael and I have already told you how the U.S. economy is doing far less well than you might imagine, and that if you look at the GNI statistics, the Gross National Income statistics, the U.S. economy is in recession. It has had several quarters of declining GNI.

On inflation then, the story that we are being told, the official story, is that the Federal Reserve has performed a miracle. It has achieved a soft landing, it has defeated inflation, and the U.S. economy is not in recession. But the reality of it is that if you go by the GNI figures, the Gross National Income figures, the U.S. is in recession in reality.

And the other problem is that, in fact, it’s quite possible that inflation has not been vanquished, because the fact is that while the more volatile prices, but particularly energy prices, have indeed gone down, at least they are down for the moment, core inflation remains stubbornly high, which is why the Federal Reserve, after talking for so many months about reducing interest rates in 2024, is already beginning to postpone the reduction of interest rates.

So, in that sense, inflation has not gone away as a problem, and this creates massive problems for financial stability to which the widening U.S. budget deficit is making its own contributions, and we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Let’s take a look at financial stability then. The fact of the matter is that we already saw at the beginning of this year that we had a series of failures of American banks, the Silicon Valley Bank and a few other banks failed, and they failed chiefly because of the way in which the Federal Reserve is trying to deal with the problem of inflation.

We’ve already discussed in the past that the problem of inflation cannot be really resolved by raising interest rates. Indeed, one economist, Robert Solow, had essentially referred to the raising of interest rates as a means of dealing with inflation as burning a house to roast a pig. I mean, you don’t need to do that. You are basically creating a lot of destruction.

But nevertheless, the U.S. Federal Reserve started raising interest rates, and this began affecting the financial institutions like Silicon Valley Bank and the other banks that went bust that had relied on the continuation of easy monetary policy.

So, in a certain sense, we are facing the prospect of another financial crisis, which in 2008, also the financial crisis occurred because in the mid-2000s, the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates once again because the dollar was falling too low, because commodity prices were rising, and as they brought interest rates up to about 5.25 percent, which is roughly where they are at right now, this was enough to prick the housing and credit bubbles, and you got the 2008 North Atlantic financial crisis as a result.

The new financial crisis has arguably already begun. It already began with the bank failures earlier in 2023, and now we read headlines like this, “Bad property debt exceeds reserves at the largest U.S. banks”. This is a Financial Times story: “Loan provisions have thinned even as regulators highlight risks in commercial real estate markets”.

FT bad property debt reserves US banks

So, they are showing us these major banks, how many lost reserves they have in relation to loans that have already become delinquent, loans on which payments have already been missed. These are the six largest banks, and except for J.P. Morgan Chase, which has a ratio higher than 1 percent, compared to 2022, in 2023, which is this light blue line, practically every bank has less than one dollar of reserve for every dollar of its exposure to bad loans in the commercial real estate market.

And these sorts of problems are, by the way, not just commercial real estate is just one, but there is also private equity. There are many other asset markets in which trouble is brewing.

And this also goes for the market in U.S. Treasurys:

US federal government net interest payments debt GDP

Because as interest rates go up, the U.S. essentially has to pay a higher rate of interest in order to borrow money on the international market.

And what’s more, over the last many years, the treasury market has been sinking, and it has essentially not got enough buyers. As a result, the Federal Reserve has had to step in in order to prop up the treasury market.

But even then, even with all the support the Federal Reserve is going to get, is giving, you can see here this up to 2023 is the real figures. And then from here on, these are estimates. And you can see that interest costs as a percentage of GDP, the interest costs on U.S. debt are going up and they will contribute to a worsening U.S. budget deficit.

So you see here, interest costs have been just a little above 1 percent for a while, and now they will go up to 2 and 3 and 4 percent. And this is going to brew trouble.

And finally, this is an interesting story that appeared:

US military spending 1537 trillion 2022

Even though the United States budget is in such deep doo-doo, basically, you have the United States government spending more and more money on the military-industrial complex.

We are told that it was, the official story is that it’s worth about $750 billion, three-quarters of a trillion dollars. But studies show that the actual size of military spending in the United States is about $1.5 trillion. That is a huge sum. The total amount of U.S. GDP itself is about %20 trillion. So you can imagine, it’s like about 7 odd percent of U.S. GDP.

So this is the state of the U.S. economy. And so we can expect in the near future to hear finally an official admission of the recession the U.S. is in, continuing inflation, and with continuing inflation, the possibility of the Federal Reserve increases interest rates.

So maybe even if it does not increase interest rates, the possibility of another financial crisis. So this is the sort of cauldron of troubles that is already brewing as the U.S. approaches an election year.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there are a couple of things. Let me go over your charts one by one again. You sort of went very quickly.

When you showed the chart about the banks being in negative equity, this is especially the case for small community banks.

FT bad property debt reserves US banks

About 30 or 40 years ago, there began to be small community banks. The smaller banks, if you notice, are the ones that are in the most trouble because they’re the ones that have made loans to local businesses, local landlords.

You already have one of the big New York City community banks going broke in the last week, just like you had the Valley National Bank go broke before. What these charts show is that the U.S. financial system in general is in negative equity.

Now, just think of that. If you have a financial system that’s in negative equity, what do you need a financial system for? The whole idea of finance is people are supposed to be abstinent and save rich people and save their money. You remember Karl Marx’s quip that the Rothschilds must be the most abstinent family in Europe because they have so much money.

Well, the fact is that if banks don’t supply money to the economy, but they’re broke and they get all the money from the government, this is just what China’s doing.

Why don’t we just say, okay, money is a public utility?

RADHIKA DESAI: Nationalize the banks.

MICHAEL HUDSON: If it’s a public utility like China, then it’s not going to make this de-industrial real estate kind of property investment.

Now, let’s look at the chart again for the interest rates going up in the U.S. economy:

US federal government net interest payments debt GDP

This has overjoyed Biden, and especially it makes Obama very, very happy. This is Obama’s dream to privatize Social Security. The government is going to say, we have to balance the budget. The Republicans are going to close down Congress, as they’re threatening to do this Friday, by the way, in order to balance the budget. Because the market, the magic of the marketplace, has raised the interest rates.

Between the higher interest rates and the military charges that you just showed, there really isn’t enough money for social spending anymore. But we can do what Margaret Thatcher did to the English economy. We can privatize Social Security. And now all the money that you had for Social Security is not going to be your money anymore. It’ll be, we put it in the hands of the banks that have already driven themselves and then the financial sector into negative equity.

Now they can take your Social Security and drive it into negative equity. That really is the grand plan, to privatize, to treat Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid like the post office. It’s all going to be privatized. That’s the neoliberal plan. And this is not an accident. This is, it’s a feature, not a bug in the economy. And that’s basically the direction we’re going in.

The privatization of finance, instead of doing the obvious thing, if finance is now broke, why not do it? The government can create the money instead of what it’s doing now.

The banks are giving the bad loans and basically they’re putting their assets with the Federal Reserve and borrowing the money to stay in business. You can be in negative equity forever as long as the Federal Reserve, which basically works for the commercial banks as their customers, is creating enough money to subsidize the negative equity for the banks and the financial sector.

What they’re not doing is subsidizing the negative equity of the wage earners, the negative equity as a result of their housing costs, their medical costs.

RADHIKA DESAI: Two things very quickly. And I think we should probably wind down because we are just about a little over an hour here. But just two quick observations that in the 2008 financial crisis, there were many people who were arguing that, yes, there should be a bailout, but not of the banks that caused the financial crisis in the first place, but of the homeowners who were not necessarily at fault. And of course, the economic benefit of bailing out the homeowners would vastly be greater for the good of the American economy than bailing out the banks.

But of course, a government that is beholden to the big financial institutions was not going to do that. And so it did what it did. It bailed out the big banks and not the poor people who lost their homes, who lost their jobs, etc.

The second thing is that, you know, I completely agree with you, Michael, that this is what neoliberal governments have done for many decades now. They essentially want to privatize everything in sight. And of course, by creating a crisis of social security and so on, that’s what they generally do. They first run down any institution, whether it’s social security or any other publicly owned asset, and then they say it’s time to privatize it because that will improve it.

But, you know, I wonder, I wonder if there are not even enough people who can buy U.S. Treasury securities, if the market for Treasury securities is not great, if the big financial institutions are already sitting on mountains of negative equity, where are they going to get the money to buy? Where is going to be the market to buy these assets that the governments are going to privatize?

Because in the history of privatization, there have been many privatizations that have had to be called off because there are not enough buyers. And we may very well be in that situation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: You pose a question, I get to answer it. The answer is they’ll get it from abroad. This is a geopolitical hour after all. Europe’s loss will be America’s gain.

What affluence is flowing in? You could say that since World War II, Europe and America have gained by keeping the prices of raw materials and the global South countries low and keeping the prices of their industrial goods very high.

What you’re seeing today from Europe is, I think, their way of solving the problem you’ve just posed. The bright spot is getting a flow of American, of European companies into the United States, relocating here because they can’t, the European economy is collapsing. You’re having a flow of labor and skilled labor from other countries into the United States. Affluence is this kind of flowing in.

If you’re not producing an economic surplus at home and you want to somehow sustain American living standards and corporate profits, it has to be done externally. It has to be done via foreign countries. And that’s the geopolitical implications of all this.

If America is turning into a deficit, parasitic economy, some other countries have to pay. And that’s why there’s all of this military spending.

RADHIKA DESAI: I would beg to differ, actually, because here’s the thing. The geopolitical economy of the North Atlantic financial crisis was roughly like this, that in the process of deregulation of European financial institutions that came along with the launching of the euro, a lot of European financial institutions ended up outside of North, the United States and Britain, becoming the main customers of the toxic securities that were being generated in the 2000s as a result of the housing and credit bubbles.

Once that bubble burst, once the crash occurred, essentially European money left and it has generally stayed away. And there, as I said, this money is not even available to buy U.S. treasury securities.

If the Europeans invest in the United States, they will be investing in creating new assets. They’re not necessarily going to buy up what the American government necessarily wants to privatize.

And what’s more, in recent decades, recent years, I should say, China and Japan have also been increasingly reluctant to buy treasury securities. So all in all, all I’m trying to say is that it is not a given that these assets, that the old tradition of essentially privatizing things at bargain basement price, even at bargain basement prices, is necessarily going to work. That’s all. I’m just wanting to raise some questions around it.

But so all in all, Michael, I think what we’ve done is we’ve painted a picture of an extremely precarious situation, an extremely dangerous situation in which people are suffering. They are unhappy. They are going to the polls. They are going, they’re being asked to choose between two candidates, both of whom have failed in signal ways. And there is not any simple way out. And so, as I say, it’s going to be a really, really rocky road to the election.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yep. If you have a democracy, you cannot let people have a vote for the other candidate. That’s what our democratic hero in Ukraine, Zelensky, says, cancel the elections. That’s what’s happening in Israel. Netanyahu, no way of throwing him out.

And that’s what’s happening here. There can’t be a third party. You have to, as long as the Republicans and the Democrats have the same program, just with a different rhetoric, that’s the new meaning of democracy.

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, I think that you’ve said that, said it, Michael. So I think with that, we’ll say goodbye for now. And we look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks. Thank you and goodbye.

And please remember to like our show and to share it as to other interested people and to subscribe to the channel. Thank you very much and goodbye.

Compradore ECOWAS Surrendered!

Par : AHH

Say whatever you wanna say,we know those who are pulling the strings. Personally , I ain’t got nothing to say! I have said enough. I rest my case! pic.twitter.com/f8jJH9sBQr

— Sy Marcus Herve Traore (@marcus_herve) February 24, 2024

 

Do you remember all the ⛈Thunder & Lightning ⚡starting with the overthrow of the French poodle Bazum of resource-rich Niger late last summer (rapidly forgotten after October 07)?? The roars of the French peacock and ECOWAS about the inadmissibility of another Junta coup overturning west-built “Freeum & Demokracy” in “our Africa?

Well, after they were stared down as they wet themselves, and Frenchie’s troops duly kicked out, and a political-economic-military merger made among the Junta Belt, and trade was rerouted elsewhere to friendly neighbors, and the trio left ECOWAS, the latter just rolled over onto its naked back and cried “Uncle!” btw, this is a preview of the best-case scenario for the combined West in 404 too.

💠 @Arab_Africa:
⭕ 🇳🇪 ECOWAS lifted sanctions on Niger. Local sources report this.
On February 24, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) announced the lifting of sanctions imposed on Niger, which include border closures, suspension of financial transactions, and a ban on the import of food and medicine.

💠 @Sputnik Africa:
⭕ ❗ECOWAS has decided to lift a number of sanctions against Niger, the head of the bloc’s commission says

The measures include the closure of borders, ban on financial transactions, and the freezing of Niger’s assets. The measures are lifted with immediate effect.

Earlier, ECOWAS Chairman and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said it was important to “re-examine our current approach to the quest for constitutional order in our member states.”

ECOWAS leaders met Saturday in Abuja to discuss the crisis in the region, which has recently seen military coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. In response, ECOWAS imposed sanctions on Mali and Niger.

In January, the three countries declared their pullout from ECOWAS. They called the bloc a “threat” to its member states and criticized it for applying “illegal, illegitimate, inhumane” sanctions against them.
⭕ ❗ECOWAS has decided to lift financial and economic sanctions against Guinea, the head of the bloc’s commission says

In 2022, the media reported that the ECOWAS countries, at an emergency summit held on the sidelines of the UNGA, decided to introduce “phased sanctions” against Guinea, which had underwent a coup d’etat in 2021.
⭕ 🇧🇫 The Vladimir Putin Sambo Tournament kicks off in Burkina Faso
🔹The martial art is becoming increasingly popular in this West African country. The Burkinabe Sambo Association, founded in September 2020, today has 18 clubs across the country.
🔹The Association plans to offer internships for Burkinabe sambo wrestlers in Russia, where athletes will be able to better understand and master this Olympic discipline.
🔹”They say that sambo is power, sambo is leadership. Vladimir Putin is an example of the power of leadership,” the secretary general of the Burkina Faso Sambo Association
☝🏾 The Russian President has been a champion in this discipline, he has a great interest in martial arts and he is a “fervent amateur” of sport in general, Amidou Guindo recalled.

“His name must be a part of the event,” he added.

👉🏾 About fifty athletes from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Russia will compete for medals in several categories. |video|
LOL! Russians aren’t the only ones who know how to impale the Yemeni dagger and rotate it with glee.

22.02.24 Speech of the Ansar Allah Leader

Par : AHH

The following is this week’s speech and cogent observations of the Yemeni leader on the state of the war against Zio-USUK, Gaza, and the wider region. He is every bit as sharp and wide ranging as Hezbollah’s Nasrallah. He gives his speech on Thursdays, the day before their now-regular million man marches in most cities of Yemen each Friday.

This week’s edition is a sober review of the ramifications of the latest UNSC veto and dismantling of the UN life-support systems by the US regime, the abjectness of the arab compradore hypocrites, the severely deteriorated plight of the poor starving Palestinians, and the losses and absolute barbarism of the savage zionist beast which is being steadily defeated in relentless and effective attrition.

@Yemen | Bab-el-Mandeb:
⭕ Statement from Sayyed Commander Abdulmalik Badraddin Al-Houthi regarding the latest developments and updates on 12 Sha’ban 1445 AH – 22-02-2024 AD:

— The oppressed Palestinian people in Gaza have been suffering for 20 weeks the most severe forms of suffering due to the Israeli aggression.
🔹The Israeli enemy in Gaza has pursued from the beginning a criminal and genocidal behavior, using all means of extermination.
🔹On the first day of the aggression, America, Britain, and most major European countries rushed to provide all forms of support to the Zionist enemy.
🔹Despite the immense military capabilities of the Israeli enemy, America and the West have provided it with weapons, money, and experts.

Where is the support of the [wealthy, powerful, neighboring] Muslims for the oppressed Palestinian people, who are part of them and have clear and established rights?
🔹The Palestinian people deserve support and solidarity for humanitarian reasons and all other considerations.
🔹Most countries, regimes, and governments are taking the stance of onlookers, some of them are complicit, and some secretly support the Israeli enemy.
🔹The betrayal of most governments and regimes, and the silence of the people, is one of the reasons for the boldness of the Israeli enemy to continue its crimes and tighten its siege.

For the third time, the American veto is used in the Security Council to prevent any decision to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
🔹America insists on continuing the genocide of the people of Gaza by all means of extermination. 
🔹The US provided the greatest cover for the starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza to reach blatant levels for countries and Western institutions.
🔹The US has used the veto power more than any other country since the formation of the Security Council to date in order to serve the Israeli enemy.
🔹The US is a key partner of the Israeli enemy in all its crimes against the Palestinian people in all past stages.
🔹The US inherited from the British the role of sponsoring the Zionist criminality and protecting the Israeli enemy, and providing all forms of support to it.
🔹The US turned the Security Council’s role and obstructed the role of the UN in any humanitarian direction in favor of the oppressed peoples.

— The responsibility of everyone, especially in the Muslim world, increases with the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the magnitude of the tragedy.
🔹What are Muslims waiting for to act? Do they want a full-blown genocide to happen to the people of Gaza?!
🔹The number of martyrs, mostly children and women, continues to rise, and the number of massacres reached 2,544, in a clear violation of human life.

— The Israeli enemy continues on its savage approach in preventing food for the people and disallowing trucks carrying food supplies from reaching the residents.
🔹The suspension of the World Food Program’s activities amid the painful levels of suffering and hunger in Gaza reveals the nature of its role.
🔹The malfeasance of the US and Israel is seen in their manipulating of international organizations and programs that operate under humanitarian titles.
🔹Deaths from starvation are on the rise, including children and the elderly.
🔹Animal feed has run out or is near depletion in many areas of the Gaza Strip, particularly in the northern part.
🔹Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are starving and appealing to their brethren through their hunger and suffering.

Where are the wealthy Arab countries that waste hundreds of billions of dollars on nonsense, trivial matters, and fueling sectarian strife yet do not offer food that is meager to the Palestinians?
🔹Many countries waste huge amounts of good food that ends up in their garbage cans, and their citizens suffer from obesity, without providing a thing of this food to the Palestinians.
🔹There are no serious and tangible moves by major Arab countries as if their role were confined to conflicts and destructive struggles that tear the nation from within.
🔹Why can’t the major Arab countries endeavor to play an honorable and positive role, even if it is something in the humanitarian vein, by delivering food, medicine, and aid to the residents of Gaza?
🔹We have seen some people’s seriousness during trivial issues when they dealt with it with great interest, and took various procedures from boycotting to waging wars.
🔹The Israeli enemy opened fire on a group of thousands of residents who were trying to obtain some food and flour, killing and wounding them.

— The Israeli enemy carried out cold-blooded executions while they were detained against the abductees, including children and women.

Where are the women’s rights that the West is bragging about, in front of the executions of women by the Israeli enemy?!
🔹The West does not repeat the slogan of women’s rights, except in immoral or trivial contexts, or to dismantle society from within.
🔹Women’s rights disappeared in the West when this woman was the Palestinian woman, and when the perpetrator and aggressor was the Israeli enemy.

— The Israeli enemy stormed the Nasser Medical Complex with tanks and drones, as if it were storming one of the largest military bases.
🔹The Israeli enemy targeted hospitals, even premature, infant, and patients of all categories.
🔹There is a real tragedy on the health side, and hundreds of thousands are suffering, and the most affected of them are the children.
🔹The Israeli enemy committed a heinous crime by forcibly kidnapping infant children from their mothers and separating thousands of children from their families during the displacement.
🔹There are 17,000 children separated from their families, according to unofficial statistics, and they are in a difficult situation.

— Given the scale of the tragedy, injustice and criminality, the Israeli enemy failed to achieve its declared goals, the most prominent of which is the return of its prisoners.
🔹The enemy has failed miserably in recovering its prisoners, despite the passage of 20 weeks of the war and in a [tiny] limited geographic area.
🔹The enemy was unable to eliminate the Mujahideen in Gaza, who are still holding on and fighting valiantly and effectively.
🔹The Mujahideen in Gaza are humiliating the enemy, despite living the same suffering that their families are experiencing in the sector.
🔹The enemy’s barbarism and its comprehensive targeting of the Palestinian people did not benefit it and did not obtain a picture of victory.

— The enemy accumulates its criminal record in terms of destruction, killing, siege and starvation, but it is becoming increasingly frustrated.
🔹 The enemy’s human losses are in the thousands, but it is trying to hide it and makes an effort in this regard.
🔹Some of the Zionist soldiers suffer from mental disorders as a result of the horrors of the battles and the clash with the Mujahideen from zero distance.
🔹The transformation of the Zionist soldier into a mentally ill or mentally disturbed person is a widespread condition among them because of their criminality and tyranny and their keenness to live.
🔹The psychological and moral harm is a disaster for the Zionists because their situation is shaky, they do not live in a state of reassurance.
🔹It is estimated that more than a million Zionists have fled the occupied territories, either permanently or temporarily, due to instability.
🔹There is a path for reverse migration because the Zionists live the act of existential threat.

— The enemy’s military losses are large and its economic losses are unprecedented, despite the huge American and Western support it enjoys.
🔹The Israeli currency is no longer stable, with a decline in foreign exchange reserves and a rise in public debt, and on the level of the large deficit in the enemy’s budget.
🔹There are repercussions in all economic fields from production and investment to labor shortage and the real estate sector.
🔹There is paralysis in the ports, a decline in tourism, and a decline in air navigation.
🔹There are terrible losses in the Israeli enemy’s economy, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars.
🔹The enemy’s losses are an important lesson despite the [western] support he enjoys.

— The enemy’s losses in confronting the modest capabilities of the Mujahideen in Gaza mean that it is an enemy that can be defeated, just as it was defeated in Lebanon and Gaza before.
🔹The support fronts continue from Lebanon with high efficiency and inflict major direct losses on the enemy.
🔹Brothers Mujahideen in Iraq continue, despite the enemy’s intensive targeting of them.

— In the Yemeni front, we have moved towards escalating our operations in response to the enemy’s increased escalation in the Gaza Strip.
🔹Our operations on “israeli” targets in the occupied lands have reached 183 missiles and drones.
🔹Support operations for Gaza in the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait are ongoing and we have escalated them.
🔹Escalation in sea operations has increased both in quantity and quality, with the activation of missiles, drones, and military boats.
🔹Submarines have been introduced into our naval operations, which is worrying for the enemy.
🔹The number of targeted ships in the sea reached 48, despite the enemy reducing its movement and camouflaging and withholding information about them.
🔹All means used by them to withhold information about the ships have been used and failed; we still manage to obtain accurate information.
🔹The available missiles have been developed to a level that the American cannot intercept or shoot down with all its technologies.
🔹There are significant real victories in the confrontation in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. There are real victories over American technologies, capabilities, and expertise. There are victories at the level of tactics, weapons, and means, and American experts were amazed by our Armed Forces’ tactics.

This week, 13 distinguished and effective operations were executed.
🔹Among the most prominent and important operations this week was the targeting of a British ship that was hit with a devastating strike that sank it.
🔹By Allah’s will, this week succeeded in downing an American MQ-9 drone, which is one of the most important American aircraft.

— The enemy failed before our sea operations; they were neither able to prevent them nor deter them nor limit them.
🔹Americans, their leaders, and officials admit, according to the established reality, that they failed to prevent Yemeni operations and protect their ships and those associated with the “israeli” entity. The American has put itself in trouble after its barges, destroyers, and military pieces were hit in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
🔹The maritime situation halted 40% of the enemy’s commercial maritime movement, affecting its economy, shrinking its exports, and imports.

— The American has a military problem and admits that it has not faced such a problem since World War II, indicating the effectiveness of the Yemeni front.
🔹The British are implicated, harmed, foolish, and stupid for involving themselves in what does not concern them. British newspapers talk about the impacts on the British economy and predictions of a sharp increase in all prices due to the rise in shipping costs.
🔹Instead of aggression against Yemen, it was supposed to stop war crimes in Gaza and introduce aid to ensure regional stability and prevent the conflict from expanding.

— The number of American and British aggression raids on Yemen and missile strikes from the sea reached 278, yet they failed to destroy Yemeni capabilities and limit their impact.
🔹The American is causing our military capabilities to develop as it tries to move others and implicate them, including Europeans and some Arab countries.
🔹We will provide protection for any ships carrying aid to the people of Gaza, contrary to what the American propagates.

— One of the silliest new American propaganda is that Yemen is extorting some European countries to allow their ships to pass through the Red Sea without targeting them. Propaganda about extorting countries is silly and false, part of countless lies launched by hypocrites.

— Military mobilization is active, with military training outputs reaching 237,123 trainees as a popular army, preceded by hundreds of thousands trained appropriately.
🔹Military parades reached 248, maneuvers reached 566, and military marches reached 359.
🔹Popular stands are part of the distinguished and honorable activity, reaching 70,670, and awareness evenings reached 30,571.
🔹Events are very important for spreading awareness, reaching 23,738 events, and demonstrations reached 2,081 in provinces and directorates.

— The Yemeni people have set an example and become a source of admiration for all free people in the world and anyone with a human conscience.
🔹Our people’s stance in this phase is historic and will remain a proud lesson in freedom, dignity, and honor that generations will be proud of for thousands of years.

2024: Slaying the Green Dragon

Par : AHH

“The Rules of the ‘Rules-based Order’ are the Will of the Green Dragon … The World stands on the Brink of Global War.”

by Alexander Dugin

The main issue in 2024 remains the same fundamental problem as before: the confrontation between two waves — the waning wave of a unipolar world order with US hegemony and the collective West, and the rising wave of a multipolar world, embodied in BRICS-10.

This problem did not arise now, but as the West, having gained at one historical moment the appearance of sole planetary domination (after the collapse of the USSR), proved incapable of implementing its leadership in practice, new sovereign poles began to assert themselves — Russia and China. Other poles are on the approach — India, the Islamic civilisation, Africa, and Latin America. In total, seven power centres, including the West. Six of them have united in BRICS, beginning to build a multipolar order.


The West continues to cling to its hegemony and attacks the most dangerous opponents to its domination — Russia, China, and the Islamic world. This did not start today but at the very beginning of the 2000s. But the current contrast of the political world map was finally acquired in recent years — especially after the beginning of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The operation became the first hot war of the multipolar world against the unipolar one. Until then — especially during President Trump’s first term and due to the rise of populism in Europe — it seemed that a direct clash could be avoided, that the West would peacefully accept multipolarity, trying to fight for a worthy place in the post-globalist world order. This is what Trump meant by calling to drain the globalist swamp in the US itself. But so far, the swamp managed to drain Trump himself and, during the most swampy administration under President Biden, to unleash a bloody conflict in Ukraine, throwing all the forces of the collective West against Russia, the most important pole of the multipolar world.

The main result of 2023 was Russia’s disruption of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which for the globalists was a decisive moment in the conflict. They supplied Ukraine with comprehensive assistance, including extensive weaponry, significant financial aid, and substantial political, informational, and diplomatic resources. However, when Russia successfully resisted these efforts and started preparing for its own offensive, it became apparent that the extensive support given to the Kiev regime was ultimately futile. However, as long as globalists are in power in the US, they intend to continue the war. And, apparently, not just to the last Ukrainian but to the last globalist.

At the end of 2023, however, a second front opened in the war between the unipolar and multipolar worlds. This time, the West’s vanguard in the Middle East, the State of Israel, in response to the invasion by Hamas, began a systematic genocide of the Gaza population, completely disregarding anything. The USA and the collective West fully supported Tel Aviv’s actions, thus drawing a new line of fracture — the West against the Islamic civilization.

American neoconservatives had already entered this cycle in the early 2000s, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and then supporting radical Islamists in Libya, Syria, and so on. Now, the West has again confronted the Islamic world, led by the Palestinians, Yemeni Houthis, Lebanese Hezbollah, and also Iran.

Furthermore, in West Africa, another platform for the anti-colonial struggle against unipolarity and for multipolarity, an alliance of the most resolute countries has emerged — Mali, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Gabon, and Niger, where a series of anti-globalist coups took place. So here, too, a new front has emerged.

Ultimately, Venezuela, led by Nicolas Maduro — whom the USA attempted to replace with their puppet, Guaido, in a move that ended in complete failure — became embroiled in a territorial dispute over the contested Guyana-Essequibo region with British Guyana, which is perceived as a pro-Atlantic puppet state. And the President of Argentina, Javier Milei, although he refused to integrate into BRICS, called on England to reconsider the issue of the Malvinas (Falklands). Thus, another front of struggle is emerging in Latin America.

So we approached the new year, 2024. And here all the trends continued at an accelerated pace. Tension for the USA in the Middle East is growing by the day. The war in Ukraine will undoubtedly continue, and now the initiative is on Russia’s side.

Also, one should expect an exacerbation of the conflict around Taiwan, where the US has pushed through the anti-Chinese candidate Lai Qingde in the elections, further escalation in the Middle East, continuation of anti-colonial revolutions in Africa, and escalation into a hot phase of contradictions in Latin America.

In the West itself, the crisis is intensifying at an accelerated pace. In the USA, there are elections this year, in which the globalists will face a powerful wave of Republicans.

The European Union is in decline, and there again rises an anti-elite, anti-liberal wave of populists — from the left and the right. There are leftists, like Sahra Wagenknecht and her new party. ‘Red Sahra’ is becoming a symbol of anti-liberal left-wing Europe.

Such leftists are primarily enemies of global capital — unlike pseudo-leftists, bought outright by Soros, who primarily advocate LGBT, Ukrainian Nazism, the genocide in Gaza, and uncontrolled migration, and also desperately fight against Russian influence, Putin, and Russia as a whole.

There is also a right-wing component — significantly battered, but in many European countries it represents the second most important political force. For example, Marine Le Pen in France. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is gaining strength. In Italy, despite the liberal weakness of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the right half of society has not disappeared. The entire right-wing populism remains as it was.


But there is the globalist West, which tries to present itself as the entire ‘West’, and there are right and left anti-globalists, as well as a huge layer of Western commoners, who make up the ‘silent majority’. This is most important: the European commoner generally does not understand anything about politics. Ordinary Europeans and Americans simply cannot keep up with the demands to change gender, forcibly castrate their little sons, marry goats, bring in and feed even more migrants, eat cockroaches, read prayers to Greta Thunberg at night, and curse the Russians. The Western commoner, the petit bourgeois, is the main support of the multipolar world. He is the core of the real West, not the sinister parody into which it has been transformed by the globalist liberal elites.

It is very possible that in 2024, all these lines of fracture — wars and revolutions, conflicts and uprisings, waves of terrorist attacks, and new territories of genocide — will escalate into something massive. The declining wave of the unipolar world is already giving way to the rising multipolar one. And this is inevitable.

The dragon of globalism is mortally wounded. But it is known how dangerous the agony of a wounded dragon is. The global elite of the West is insane. There are many reasons to believe that in 2024 there will be something terrible. We are at arm’s length from a global world war. On all fronts. If it cannot be avoided, then there is nothing left but to win it.

We must slay the dragon to free humanity from its villainous enchantments, and even the West itself, which is its first victim.

Russia’s Fight Against The West (2/2)

Par : AHH

The second part of the New Rules Podcast Special. The Emergence of a new Russia and the crisis of Western globalist elites.

hosted by Dimitri Simes Jr. at the New Rules.

Alexander Dugin and Pepe Escobar join us to discuss how the Ukraine conflict has permanently changed Russia and the world. This is the second part of our geopolitical super-episode.

Twitter (X):

⚔🐉 Slaying the Dragon of Globalism (2/2)

Alexander Dugin and Pepe Escobar join us to discuss the crisis of globalism, the multipolar revolution, and the risk of WWIII. This is part two of our geopolitical super-episode.
#NewRulesPodcast @Agdchan @RealPepeEscobar pic.twitter.com/swnFpDIZXr

— NewRulesGeopolitics (@NewRulesGeo) February 16, 2024

Rumble:

Poutine visite une usine de tanks dans l’Oural

poutine tank

poutine tankLe président russe Vladimir Poutine est arrivé jeudi 15 février dans la région de Sverdlovsk et s’est immédiatement rendu à

L’article Poutine visite une usine de tanks dans l’Oural est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Russia’s Fight Against The West (1/2)

Par : AHH

A New Rules Podcast Special! The Emergence of a new Russia and the crisis of Western globalist elites.

hosted by Dimitri Simes Jr. at the New Rules.

Alexander Dugin and Pepe Escobar join us to discuss how the Ukraine conflict has permanently changed Russia and the world. This is part one of our geopolitical super-episode.

Twitter (X):

🇷🇺Russia’s Fight Against Globalism (1/2)

Alexander Dugin and Pepe Escobar join us to discuss how the Ukraine conflict has permanently changed Russia and the world. This is part one of our geopolitical super-episode.
#NewRulesPodcast @Agdchan @RealPepeEscobar pic.twitter.com/Il3mDZMf99

— NewRulesGeopolitics (@NewRulesGeo) February 14, 2024

Rumble:

Commentaires sur l’ordonnance du 26 janvier 2024 rendue par la Cour Internationale de Justice.

L’Afrique du Sud a déposé devant la Cour Internationale de Justice, une requête contre l’État d’Israël, accusé de perpétrer un génocide dans la bande de Gaza. La procédure de l’Afrique du Sud repose sur l’application de la Convention internationale de… Lire la suite

Karaganov: Lowering the Nuclear Threshold

Par : AHH

Lowering the Nuclear Threshold? – Sergey Karaganov, Alexander Mercouris, and Glenn Diesen

Many practical steps have been taken by the West to lower the nuclear threshold. US tactical weapons are due to return to the same Britain which has already deployed nearly every weapon in its arsenal against Russia in the Ukraine! Their ability to discharge these plans or be effective is another matter, but the madmen continue to march into the Abyss, flouting common sense, the Russian nuclear doctrine (treating deployment of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons against them as equivalent) and even basic self-preservation. It is, to mirror the Ukies’ current “operations” against civilians and civilian infrastructure within Russia, to speak plainly — nuclear terrorism.

≈≈

The Americans and the British are lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons: about the reasons

According to media reports, the United States intends to deploy its tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) and their delivery systems on the territory of the United Kingdom. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation has already reacted rather nervously to this information, since this event is another evidence of the Anglo-Saxons’ readiness to actually use a nuclear arsenal in order, as in World War II, to put a bullet in the Third, completing it on their own terms.

NW

It should be noted that Great Britain itself has long been an official member of the “nuclear club.” This country is the third in the world to test nuclear weapons of its own design, right after the USA and the USSR. Britain’s first nuclear explosive device was so bulky that it had to be installed on board an anchored frigate. Naturally, London chose not its own coast for testing, but the western tip of distant Australia, namely in the area of ​​the Monte Bell Islands. The power of the nuclear explosion was about 25 kilotons.

The location in the immediate vicinity of the coast was not chosen by chance, since the British considered the USSR as a potential enemy and feared that the insidious Russians could themselves deliver nuclear explosive devices to British ports on civilian ships and detonate them there. You have to come up with something like this! Be that as it may, in London they really wanted to assess what effect the detonation of such special ammunition near the coast would have. The tests were successful, which gave Prime Minister Winston Churchill grounds to declare that Great Britain had become the owner of nuclear weapons. However, by this time the USA and the USSR already had thermonuclear bombs, and the British had to quickly catch up with them. Note that Australia and its desert territories were again used as a testing ground.

London’s lag behind Washington and Moscow was due to a number of objective circumstances. The difficult Second World War, which Great Britain went through from bell to bell, played a role. Work on a nuclear bomb there began back in 1940, in 1943 the British joined forces with the Americans, but the 1946 atomic energy law (McMahon Act), adopted in the United States, also limited their access to information about advanced nuclear technologies.

The more interesting is the current state of affairs. Currently, the United Kingdom exclusively possesses strategic nuclear weapons (NSW), which ensure its national security and the ability to add fuel to the fire of other people’s conflicts with impunity. British nuclear weapons are actually American.

These are the fourth-generation Trident II three-stage ballistic missiles designed to be launched from nuclear submarines. They make up 52% ​​of the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and 100% of the British. Only four strategic submarines of the Vanguard class are used as carriers, one of which is constantly on combat duty. This should be remembered by those who, in the comments, call on the Kremlin to hit London with a “vigorous bomb”.

It’s not a problem to strike, but in response, ballistic missiles will fly at Russian megacities from somewhere under the water. The only Vanguard class SSBN can fire 8 missiles carrying a total of up to 40 thermonuclear warheads.

Application threshold

The UK’s nuclear arsenal is believed to number 225, of which 160 are ready for use. It is obvious that strategic nuclear forces are a weapon of strategic deterrence, which is necessary in order to have, but never use. However, the Anglo-Saxons are openly preparing to use nuclear arsenals for the second time in human history.

Thus, back in the relatively calm year of 2020, the Americans created a low-power nuclear warhead W76-2 for underwater-based Trident II missiles. Their power is something like 5 kilotons, which is 5 times less than that of the first British special ammunition, tested back in 1952 off the coast of Australia. Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Ryabkov then stated with concern the following, verbatim:

The appearance of low-power charges on US strategic carriers means that the discussions previously voiced in declarative form on the American side about the possibility of using such weapons in a hypothetical conflict are already being embodied in metal, in products. This is a reflection of the fact that the United States is actually lowering the nuclear threshold, that it is allowing itself to wage a limited nuclear war and win such a war.

And now the Americans are preparing to place tactical nuclear weapons in Great Britain, which the British do not currently have at all. Based on an analysis of the draft budget of the US Air Force, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS, Federation of American Scientists) came to the conclusion that the Pentagon intends to return tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Foggy Albion. It will be located in a storage facility at Lakenheath airbase, 100 km northeast of London:

Due to the arrival of airmen, driven by the launch of the Surety mission and the deployment of two F-35 squadrons, RAF Lakenheath is experiencing a significant shortage of housing available to pilots at the E-4 level and below.

Apparently, we are talking about the newest version of the B61-12 aerial bombs, which will be carried by the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-35A Lightning II fighters. Uncle Sam defiantly loads and hangs the gun on the wall. In whose direction should it then shoot?

Author: Sergey Marzhetsky


and this came out just yesterday on RT:

US to redeploy nuclear weapons to UK – Telegraph

The United States is planning to deploy nuclear weapons to the UK for the first time in 15 years, The Telegraph reported Friday, citing Pentagon documents.

The report comes amid heightened tensions between NATO and Russia over the Ukraine conflict, and calls from some Western politicians to prepare for a potential armed clash with Moscow.

The British newspaper cited procurement contracts for a new facility at the Royal Air Force station at Lakenheath in Suffolk, which point to Washington’s intention to bring nuclear weapons to the base. RAF Lakenheath is expected to house B61-12 bombs that are three times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the Telegraph said. The US sent F-35 nuclear-capable fighters to the base last year.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last year that Moscow would be compelled to enact “compensatory countermeasures” if American nuclear warheads were to return to Britain. Russia has accused the West of stoking tensions in Europe and maintains that the eastward expansion of NATO is one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict.

High-ranking European officials, including German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, have spoken of the need to brace for a potential war with Russia. Last week the chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, urged the bloc to be “readier across the whole spectrum” for direct confrontation.

The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, dismissed the claims that Moscow was planning an offensive against NATO as “information warfare” aimed at justifying “hybrid aggression.”

New Year 2024 annual review interview with Venezuela President Maduro by Ignacio Ramonet

Par : amarynth

Presidente Maduro en entrevista con Ignacio Ramonet evalúa con perspectiva crítica los retos del 2024

video Nicolás Maduro | Entrevista con Ignacio Ramonet

Ignacio Ramonet (IR ): Mr. President, good evening. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation to this interview, which is already like number seven or eight that we have done as the first interview of the year.

President Nicolás Maduro (NM): Well, this interview is very good because it always serves as a reflective balance of all these difficult years, full of efforts, sacrifices. It serves as a balance sheet, and also as a perspective for the future. So always at your disposal, Ramonet.

 “We have solved the Canserbero enigma”

IR: Thank you very much. This interview, in fact, has the objective of taking stock of the year a little. In particular, the balance sheet of the achievements, the victories, the advances that have occurred in Venezuela. And also if you could define some perspectives. We are going to see it throughout the interview. But, if you allow, first I would like to start with something that is a little outside our topic, but that has had a great impact, especially on the millions of young people who are admirers of the Venezuelan singer-rapper Canserbero. A few days ago we learned that the “Canserbero enigma” has been solved. It was thought that Canserbero had committed suicide, but the Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office has revealed that he was, in fact, murdered. How could you comment on this information?

NM: Yes, it has truly been a scientific, professional work of reconstruction of the events, of the facts, which has led to a forceful, definitive conclusion, of who are the intellectual and material authors responsible for the murder of this young artist, of this Venezuelan creator who in such a short time of musical career as a composer had such a great impact on youth. And he still has it, and more than in his youth. Ramonet, he impressed me (…) We, Cilia and I, have grandsons and granddaughters of all ages, and our grandchildren are eight, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen years old, Fourteen, fifteen years old are connoisseurs and followers of the art, music, composition, and lyrics of Canserbero. I’m very surprised.

IR: Especially since he died about eight years ago, right?

NM: Nine years ago now. And it surprises me because I confess to you I am a musical man, I am more into salsa, rock, although I am aware of current trends (…) In the year 2023, I listened on Spotify and I have a very popular, popular playlist, very full of music of all kinds. But I, until maybe two years ago, didn’t know who Canserbero was… And I found out because my grandchildren explained it to me, and they told me song by song, we analyzed song by song. And from there an interest in the art of Canserbero was born in me. On some occasion I spoke with the attorney general, also an admirer of Canserbero’s art, and after putting together a set of elements that made up a solid hypothesis about what had happened… All the media and networks had tarnished Canserbero’s name, they had said that he was a murderer… Even after his death, the Public Ministry even accused him of murder.

IR: He was accused of having committed a homicide before his suicide.

NM: Yes, and then later they imposed the complete thesis of homicide, suicide, schizophrenia and madness. And despite that stain that was cast on him, unfair, brutal, despite that, what his name, his lyrics, his art did grow and Canserbero today is recognized in the world as, if not the main, one of the main rappers in the Spanish language. So the investigation was opened by the Public Ministry. I expressed my support, and gave the prosecutor as always, but in this particular case, all my support. He did all the investigations with the most advanced forensic science, criminology. And the results have been overwhelming. Justice has been done, the name of a young noble Venezuelan creator has been vindicated, and I would say what he has done is growing now.

I spoke with her relatives the day Attorney General Tarek William Saab gave the results, with the videos of the confession of the murderer and the murderer, of the two murderers, and I spoke with her family, and her family felt relieved. His father Cheo, his sisters, his nieces. I gave them a hug over the phone. And I told them, well, he is a strong spirit, wherever Canserbero is he is a very strong spirit. And now his name will increase among the youth of Venezuela, Latin America, the Caribbean, and much beyond. So justice has been done, which speaks very well of the Public Ministry of Venezuela.

“We have greatly energized foreign policy”

IR: This has been one of the achievements of these last days of the year 2023, but as we said there have been others. 2023 was a symbolic year because it was the tenth year of your Government. In particular I would like to emphasize some international contacts that you have had, some trips abroad, meetings. In particular several meetings with President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who organized a ” Conference on Venezuela in Bogotá”; a meeting with President Lula, who has returned to power. Recently in Brazil, you were at the meeting that Lula organized on South America; other strategic trips, in particular to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and above all the very important trip to China, your meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. How are these contacts, these trips integrated into the traditional geopolitics of the diplomacy of the Bolivarian Revolution?

A New World Balance is Taking Place

NM: In the world there is already a new era. The era of the Western empires is already passing, definitely, and the last of the empires, Westerners, the American empire, is in a process of historical decline that is structural, it is definitive. The United States will always be a power if it remains united, if several independent states do not emerge from there. It is one of the possible, probable trends that are predicted within a few decades. It’s like the United Kingdom; Great Britain was a military, economic, commercial, naval super empire… And well, it ceased, fell, declined… But it is still a powerful, important country.

Today, a world of greater balance has emerged, as the Liberator Simón Bolívar dreamed of. Incidentally, we are in the Birthplace of our hero, of our father, the Liberator Simón Bolívar, and from very early in the 19th century, he spoke of the need to “build a universe of balance”, a “world of balance”. And that was when the Liberator conceived the strategy that we could call today the “strategy of a multipolar world,” where our America, liberated by its sword, by its army, by our army, was one of the great blocks. In fact the Grand Colombia was founded in the Orinoco, on December 17, 1819. It was born as a power, an Atlantic, Caribbean, Pacific, Amazonian, Andean power, which encompassed what we are today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and part of Central America and Ecuador. It was born as a territorial, population, military, and economic power.

IR: Like another Brazil almost…

NM: Yes, practically, and also having two arms, one over the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic, and the other over the Pacific, having the entire Andes Mountains, having a gigantic space over the Amazon.

And that power was called, as the Liberator attempted at the Congress of Panama in 1826, to constitute a powerful bloc of nations, a union of republics… Treason prevailed, imperial intrigue prevailed, and Bolívar’s project was stabbed, it was betrayed, it was sullied, it was forgotten… And then, from where a powerful bloc should have been born, there remained ten, fifteen, twenty “republiquitas”, we could say in quotes, with respect to all, but fifteen “republiquitas”, everyone on their own, everyone was dominated.

So the concept of the “balance of the universe”, of a “multipolar world” that was the great dream of the giant, of our Liberator, is seeing its emergence today. And we are attentive. Commander Hugo Chávez spoke of a “new world geopolitics”, and thus established it: Bolivarian peace diplomacy. Its crisscrossing axis is the construction of a new world geopolitics, a new axis of world power, and the insertion of Venezuela into that axis.

From Latin America in the first place, from South America, from the Caribbean and from Latin America and the Caribbean to the world. That is why, this year, we have greatly energized our foreign policy. We participate in the attempt that Lula has made to re-found Unasur, a very important one that is advancing step by step, not without threats or imperial conspiracies, so that those do not happen. We have participated in the consolidation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States this year, a solid Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). We have participated in the Palenque Summit with the president of Mexico López Obrador, to talk about the entire issue of climate change, migration, development, independence. And we received the support of all of Central America and part of South America on the issue of sanctions, to demand the lifting of the sanctions.

“Our visit to China was monumental”

And at a global level we have consolidated our relationship this year to a great degree with Turkey, with India, with Russia, with China. Our visit to China was monumental. I have gone to China as chancellor six, seven times, accompanying Commander Chávez, and then as president I have also gone five, six times. And I tell you, the level of relations, agreements signed, and policies defined between President Xi Jinping, between China and Venezuela in this six-day visit, has no comparison, has no parallel. First, we elevate the relationship to a high-level strategic relationship “foolproof and for all times.”

IR: Is that the expression that appears in the document?

NM: Yes, that is the expression, it is a concept that, for the first time, China attributes to a relationship jointly, to a country in Latin America and the Caribbean. Which raises the whole level. So I would say that we are advancing in the midst of the imperial siege, in the midst of the permanent attack, we are advancing in weaving the new world.

Venezuela humbly, modestly, yes, with the greatness of Bolívar’s thought, with the greatness of Chávez ‘s new global geopolitics, we are persevering in the construction of a multipolar world, a world of truly free countries and peoples.

“They already tried to kill Alex Saab by order of Iván Duque”

IR: Mr. President, among the achievements of your Government, I would like to cite three recent ones. First: the Barbados Agreements in October, which have made it possible to establish an agreement with the extra-parliamentary opposition. Second: The referendum on Guyana Essequiba on December 3, which has been an enormous victory in terms of mobilization. And third, the recent release of diplomat Alex Saab.
On this last issue, on the other two, we will return later – I would like you to complete for us, because you have already made a statement about it, some details about how and how difficult the negotiation was to obtain the release of Alex Saab.

NM: First, as we have said: Alex Saab is a businessman of Colombian origin, who settled in Venezuela and began to develop a set of very important investments. At one point, in 2011, he joined the plans of which would be the Great Venezuela Housing Mission. Later, in the stage that it was my turn to direct, he became involved in social plans, but above all he began playing a very important, growing role when criminal sanctions arrived.

IR: Starting in 2016.

NM: Yes, 2016, 2017, 2018, because he became involved… I have started to think… First he is Colombian, he has Colombian blood. Secondly, he has Palestinian blood, that’s where that streak of rebellion comes from. And he began to work with great skill to overcome the sanctions that were being taken against Venezuela.

IR: On your own initiative? Out of patriotism?

NM: On my own initiative and also due to a set of policies that I implemented, calling on the private sectors so that, from capital, from private investment, we could move forward, given that all our bank accounts had been stolen, frozen, Ramonet. You have to see that a country freezes all our bank accounts, not only freezes them but steals all its money, more than 21 billion dollars, freezes our properties abroad, prohibits us from selling our products abroad to the world. They persecute our main industry, the oil industry, which made us lose, I always say it because there may be people who do not listen to it, it made us lose 99% of the country’s income, we went from 54,000 million dollars approximately, one year, to 700 million dollars the following year… And the manifest, direct objective of imperialism was to collapse our society and proceed to a violent change of government, what they call in their strategic manuals, a “regime change”. And that’s good, as Fidel said; Fidel always told us: “Crises create men,” “they create leadership.”

I would say that, in that crisis, a man emerged: Alex Saab, and he began with imports brought from his capital, he began to bring food, the CLAP boxes (Local Supply and Production Committee) in the difficult times of 2017, 2018. And that’s why they punished him and his entire family, his brothers, his sister, his father, his mother, they punished everyone. And then they start to persecute him… And they also start to persecute the companies where he, in Mexico and other countries, made the CLAP boxes, and threaten them with different sanctions.

When 2019 and especially 2020 arrived, he had been playing an important role in three key areas, especially in 2020, when the quarantine and the Covid pandemic arrived. One, to continue playing a very important role in guaranteeing the CLAP, at that time we were still not producing the CLAP in Venezuela, as we had to later, fortunately… Thanks to the efforts of thousands of agricultural producers, peasants, from the Venezuelan countryside. Today we are producing 85% of the food in Venezuela, an agricultural miracle achieved by who? By the workers, by the producers… But not at that time. We brought 90% of the CLAP boxes from abroad to serve 7 million families. And he was a key man in the articulation of those imports.

But also, given the blockade, we had the refinery, the four refineries in Venezuela stopped, we did not get a spare part, we could not buy it, if we got it, say, if we got this spare part in such a country, we did not have a bank account to pay for it, because of the sanctions… Then we made triangulations to resolve the issue and recover the four refineries in a miraculous and heroic way, thanks to the engineering and knowledge of the Venezuelan oil workers, and the support of our friends in the world, important friends in the world. And then Alex Saab was a man to start bringing fuel to Venezuela.

And furthermore, he had made the connections in the world to bring medicines to the most needy patients, and particularly the key medicines for the issue of the coronavirus pandemic. That’s when they kidnapped him.

IR: In Cape Verde.

NM: Yes, in Cape Verde. Two days before they had tried to kill him. That has never been said… Two days before, a group of criminals hired by Iván Duque from Colombia tried to kill Alex Saab in his house, in Caracas… He miraculously saved his own life. And then he, with the drive that carries him, because he is an enterprising man, of drive, of initiative, I would say reckless, I would tell you that Alex Saab has the temerity of a Che Guevara to face risks and dangers. He left, he was going to Iran. Why was he going to Iran? To guarantee gasoline for a year for Venezuela, 2020, 2021, while we recovered the refinery. Why was he going to Iran? To get triangulated medicines from Iran. And on the way they capture him, they kidnap him without any type of police order.

IR: Without a court order…

NM: No, there was no international arrest warrant in the first place. Secondly, he had the protection of a diplomatic passport, a diplomatic official of a legitimate government, recognized by the United Nations. When they kidnapped him, they violated the conventions that protect diplomatic immunity in the world, something very serious. And then, well, everything that is already known: the torture…

The first thing they tried – as he explained – in that month of July, in the middle of the quarantine, they asked him to, with a call, to stop the gasoline boats; that, with a call, to stop the shipments of medicines… There is a key medicine, Ramonet, which is Remdesivir, which had just emerged then as the great antiviral against the coronavirus. And they were desperate to stop it. With Remdesivir, when it arrived in Caracas, in July 2020 and until today, thousands of lives of very serious patients who were intubated throughout the country were saved. And they also wanted Alex Saab to stop the CLAP boxes with a call, so that there would be what?

Mortality due to lack of medicine, famine and zero gasoline, as we were almost… In fact, I can tell you that of the five ships that he hired – we paid him but he triangulated them – of the five gasoline ships that came only two ships were able to arrive in June 2020… Unforgettable! It was a party for Venezuela… The other three ships were stolen by the United States … Stolen! They took them to the United States … Pirates, privateers, thieves! Then came the whole stage of torture so that he would give validity to the infamies against us, to the lies that are still going around… Because garbage portals of the sewer, such as the Semana de Colombia sewer, which is a sewer of the Colombian drug trafficking oligarchy, Semana magazine still writes: “Maduro’s front man Alex.” I’ve never had a front man! I have never had a bank account abroad. I have never had companies or properties, nor do I want to have them in my life, ever… My relationships with national and international businessmen have been and are work relationships for the country; and it was so much so that imperialism could never show, in three and a half years of having him kidnapped, it could never show a single false piece of evidence, a false paper about the supposed front men, dirty deals and all the rot that they invent in the sewer of their justice and in the sewer of their media.

So we never leave anyone behind, we never abandon anyone… Ever! We were always, we were at the side of his family, to his wife Camila who was a housewife, from a housewife she became a leader of a powerful movement, the Free Alex Saab movement; we were at the side of his sons, of his daughters, of his entire family, next to his family; in a loving way… In a special way Cilia who practically talked every week with Camilla, we had information here, there. And as I told Alex when he got out of the car and I waited for him there at the golden door of the Miraflores Palace: “Alex, I knew that this day you were going to arrive. And it came.” A miracle? A miracle like only revolutionaries, who are firm and who confront the empire with the truth, can do. A miracle.

IR: It was a beautiful victory, President. Throughout the world, many people were happy about that release, because they had campaigned to denounce all the falsehoods that were said about Alex Saab.

NM: Ramonet, I can’t say… but I received words of congratulations from people you can’t even imagine, who are surely seeing this, from the world, you can’t even imagine. People who sent me congratulations. From people in the United States of America. I’m not going to say names of great world artists… Some of them I don’t even know. And I have received messages from here, messages from there. Saying: this is how you treat an innocent man. We made an exchange that was worked on, as José Martí said: “It had to be done in silence.” With the prudence of the case, with the diplomacy of the case and we managed to miraculously free an innocent man. And in the exchange we handed over a group of convicted and confessed terrorists who had committed crimes and crimes in the country, convicted and confessed. It was the price we paid for the kidnapping. For the freedom of the kidnapped. And I think it was well worth it.

“We are building a new diversified economic model that gives us absolute independence from the entire world”

IR: Mr. President, continuing with the balance of the year: you defined eight very important lines of work for 2023. And among them the guidelines of the economy. I would like to ask you, what assessment do you make of that approach? What are the main achievements achieved in these eight lines of work?

NM: Look, I think that 2023 is a step forward too. We have ten quarters of continuous economic growth that began at the end of 2021. And we have managed to maintain growth in what I defined as the Bolivarian Economic Agenda, 18 engines, the 18 engines go step by step. These 18 engines need public policies, incentives, investment, national market, international market, good public management, good private management, good coordination.

I believe that we have achieved perfect coordination with all the country’s internal economic actors, and I believe that we have a very high dialogue and understanding with international economic actors who are arriving with new investments. It is a great achievement of these years, which will be consolidated in 2023. I have some important numbers here for you.

“ten consecutive quarters of growth”

IR: Growth in 2022 was 12% or so.

NM: Correct.

IR: In 2023, what growth has Venezuela had?

NM: The Central Bank has not given figures yet, although they tell me that ECLAC’s expectation of 4.5% could be met. There are ten consecutive quarters of growth. Still in the middle of the siege, and with our own investment.

A 5% growth in agricultural activity. We already have five consecutive quarters of agricultural activity growing more than five points, producing our food. And even exporting part of that food.
A sustained growth of 4% for ten quarters of all private manufacturing activity in the country, in a sustained, sustainable recovery, still has much room to grow the entire manufacturing sector.

An approximate growth of 4% in commercial activity until the third quarter. This fourth quarter that just ended now in December is a much higher level, there has been maddening commercial activity, with impressive strength.

Manufacturing production of food and beverages has grown above 1.6%. Well, here I have other information. I’m not going to overwhelm you with all the data.

IR: The trend is very positive…

NM: Yes, the trend is positive. In the fishing catch, in the recovery of the country’s fishing capacity, this year we have grown 25%. In the aquaculture activity, which is also an activity to which we have paid special attention, this year we grew by 20%. In the shrimp sector, which is an export sector, it grew 98% in the year 2023. An increase in industrial, agro-industrial production… And the arrival of important European, American, Chinese, Indian firms, etc., to invest in oil, gas and basic companies.

It means that, under the conditions established by our Constitution and our laws, we are advancing. Tax collection this year grew by 25.8%.  I would still say, according to the needs of the country and the expectations of what our social plans for recovery of the social welfare state have to be, tax collection still – although has grown quite a bit this year – it still has a lot of ground to gain, to guarantee income that allows us to improve the income of workers, social investment.

This year we are exceeding, up to the month of November, the collection of 5,181 million. It means that there is a set of very important elements, exchange rate stability, the definitive expiration of hyperinflation, we have stopped inflation as a structural evil of the hundred-year-old economy, and with the policies we are implementing we have serious prospects of improving that element, that variable in the months and years to come.

The credit portfolio increased by 91% compared to 2022. 91%. They are still modest figures that are around 1,400 million dollars. Venezuela would need four thousand, six thousand, eight billion dollars, the credit portfolio, or much more for investment; but it is something that has been achieved in a sustained, sustained manner.

IR: And all this in the context of a blockaded and besieged country. Which has more merit.

NM: That’s important to mention. Because the country, despite the progress we have made in the Barbados Agreements that we are going to talk about, and the conversations with the United States government, Venezuela today does not have accounts abroad, today it continues to be a persecuted and besieged country. And we have achieved all this with our own efforts, we alone, the Venezuelans, I can tell you, I tell you with pride. We have achieved all this with our own work. The private sector, small, medium, large, with some investment that has been coming from abroad, with public policies that are consensual, correct, relevant, fair, we have been achieving it with our own efforts, practically alone in this world.

IR: Without significant foreign investment?

NM: And saying as the great Ho Chi Minh said in Vietnam, thinking with our own head, walking with our own feet and building with our own hands, without depending on anyone. Do you know what one feels? That we are in a stage – and I tell you here in the house where Bolívar, the giant of America, was born – a stage where we are building a new diversified economic model that gives us absolute independence from the entire world, if necessary. Another element for your analysis, and for the analysis of all those in the world who read us here.

In the year 2023, Venezuela achieved the highest level of internal supply in its internal market in the last twenty-five years; 97% supply, mainly with its own production, and with the activity of the private economic sectors with complementary imports. With a very clear policy of what is imported, what is not imported, and protection of the national producer.

So I think we are taking certain steps. I always say, of course there is still a long way to go, especially to generate the wealth that we need to impact salaries, income. We have done our best to improve the comprehensive income of workers, the minimum comprehensive income of workers. And also completing a circuit with the Great Missions and Missions to protect public health, public education. With the construction of 500,000 homes per year to protect, with the CLAP and food programs, the people’s right to food. To put the human being at the center and protect them comprehensively while we recover the capacity, not only to generate and produce goods, products, services, but also liquid wealth, which is where our main effort is directed, and I know that we are going to achieve it. I’m sure of that.

We have reduced crime and dismantled the prison mafias

IR: Mr. President, there is another important achievement that you have not mentioned, which is security. For a long time one of the most systematic criticisms of the international media, to criticize the Bolivarian revolution, was to say that Venezuela was a very insecure, very dangerous country, that Caracas was a city dominated by crime, by delinquency. All that to some extent has changed. Today Caracas is an increasingly peaceful city, increasingly safer, the nights of Caracas have come back to life, tourists, travelers, and foreign correspondents confirm this. It is a huge achievement. Could you explain to us, how was this that seemed almost impossible achieved?

NM: Well, tremendous work has been done based on a concept that is the Peace Quadrants. The Peace Quadrants are a territorial concept. Today we have three thousand Quadrants of Peace.

IR: Throughout the country?

NM: Yes, throughout the country. The Peace Quadrant brings together who? It brings together the police and security forces, it brings together popular power, all popular power in its diversity, and it brings together all the institutions that have to do with security. The Peace Quadrants have provided a contribution to liberate the territories where there was the highest crime rate and to establish the operating rules of peace communities; quadrants of peace, communities of peace, I think that is one of the elements.

The other element has to do with intelligence work to dismantle the most dangerous criminal gangs, which are like gangs of a new generation, more armed, more organized gangs, with a lot of money. And we have done intelligence work and surgical strikes against the gangs in different cities and places in the country. For example: in Caracas, we remember the surgical strike that we gave to the gang of a neighborhood that was known in the world, which was Cota 905. That meant that, in Caracas, climates of coexistence, tranquility, and peace were established; because there was a hotbed there, Cota 905, it was an incredible hotbed, connected to the criminal gangs of Colombia in the time of Iván Duque. When we entered his lair, the first thing we found was about twenty Colombian paramilitaries on a mountain, training for a supposed “popular insurrection” in Caracas that they were going to lead; to tell you something.

And thirdly, this year 2023, progress was made in dismantling prison mafias, from very emblematic prisons in the center of the country, in the west, in the Andes, in the east, in the south of the country.
And I think it has been a very important blow to put an end to those prison mafias, to take away that center of crime. It is a policy, we call it Operation Gran Cacique Guaicaipuro, that will be maintained.

So, in that sense, I have great confidence that we are going to continue advancing in Venezuela as a territory of security, a territory of peace. And I always make a call to the people, this does not depend on one man, this depends on the joint effort that we make in the Peace Quadrants, it is the formula.

I have even told some Latin American governments. I’m not going to say names. I have told some Latin American governments: I would like to share with you the experience of the Peace Quadrants so that you can see that the fusion and union in the territory of the forces of order, the police forces and the social organization – in the case of Venezuela of popular power – gives great results.

“The president of Guyana is making fun of Lula, Celac and Caricom…”

IR: Mr. President, another important achievement, we mentioned before, is the recent referendum on Guyana Essequiba, which has been a success because the support has shown that the population has contributed to that demand. The success of that referendum forced the president of Guyana to sit down with you to talk directly about the fate of Guyana Essequiba. But since then there has been the sending of a British warship, which you have denounced. So, in these circumstances, how do you see the future of the negotiations with Guyana over Guyana Essequiba?

NM: At this moment, we could say, we are going through a moment of turbulence. Because Guyana acts not like the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, Guyana is acting like “British Guyana”, accepting that a warship goes to its coasts and from its coasts threatens Venezuela. Because that warship, since it left for its coasts, went with a voice of threat to Venezuela. And the impertinent, insolent statements of the British Foreign Ministry have been to reaffirm its threat to Venezuela. So they act, the president of Guyana acts like a president of a colonial British Guyana. He acts like a tied, subjugated country. I don’t accept his excuses, I don’t accept them! He tries to excuse himself, President Irfaan Ali, saying that Guyana will never threaten Venezuela. But it is not he who has uttered a word of threat, it is his owners, it is the old and declined and rotting ex-British empire that has sent a ship… They believe that Venezuela is the Venezuela in 1902, when they came with their ships to bombard Maracaibo, Puerto Cabello, La Guaira; when they came to massacre the people of Venezuela to impose the Arbitration Award of 1899, to collect the illegal, immoral debts of the 19th century. No, Venezuela today is not the one of 1902. The Venezuela that Cipriano Castro had. No no. It is a Venezuela that has military power to respond. And I say it with humility, with simplicity. Because I know the Venezuelan military very well. And I know that they give their lives to defend the sovereignty of this country, to protect this country. I have told you, we are a people of peace. For the good, everything. For the hard way, don’t try us. Don’t try us!

So what is the government in London doing and what is the President of Guyana doing? Make fun of President Lula, make fun of CELAC president Ralph Gonsalves, make fun of all the Caricom countries… That’s what they’ve done, make fun of them. They have mocked by threatening Venezuela with a military ship. They have mocked, and they have kicked the Argyle Agreement, they have kicked it.

Right now we are in a situation of turbulence. That we know how to face. Because we were not born on the day of cowards. Did you hear Ramonet? I was not born on the day of cowards, and I know very well as head of state and commander in chief of the Armed Forces what I have to do to defend the dignity of Venezuela. And here no one is going to come and threaten us with ships. Not today nor ever. This is not Venezuela in 1902. Make no mistake about Venezuela. Do not get it wrong!

 “With the US we have always sought dialogue, understanding, coexistence”

IR: Mr. President, after the Barbados Agreements, with the extra-parliamentary opposition, the Biden Administration was forced to suspend part of the sanctions against Venezuela What next steps do you foresee on the path to normalization of relations with the United States?

NM: First, two things must be said. First, I have promoted dialogue more than a thousand times with all sectors of the opposition. These dialogues with the extremist Guaidosista sector of the far-right opposition, as I call it, which is the spoiled and preferred opposition of the United States, is the pro-American, pitiyanqui opposition… Gathered in the Unitary Platform, the PUV. These dialogues I have promoted them and we support them permanently, always and without stopping. Those are the public dialogues that are known.

But in private dialogues I have met with all of them. In the year 2020, 2021. They spoke bad things about Guaidó to me. I told them: act, but they didn’t dare. And they take Guaidó out when he is already rotting garbage, Guaidó already smells very bad, and the gringos take him out of the country, they take him to Miami, multimillionaire as he is, he robbed half the world, he robbed the gringos, he robbed the opposition, robbed everyone; and they removed him because his discredit in that sector of the opposition was already unbearable. But we have always had dialogue with them. Even though sectors of that opposition sit down to talk but continue conspiring below, they always continue conspiring below. To seek to carry out a coup d’état in Venezuela, to seek to kill me, etc. But I believe in dialogue, permanently.

And secondly with the United States. Commander Chávez always sought and taught me to seek dialogue, understanding, and coexistence with the United States of America. And that’s what we’ve always done. What the commander did with Bill Clinton. With George W. Bush twice, even though Bush led a coup here on April 11-13, 2002. It is what he sought with Barack Obama, the first Obama term. The second Obama term was my turn, and that second Obama is the one who took the decree declaring Venezuela an “enemy of the United States. ” Face to face, face to face, Obama told me: “Maduro, that was a mistake, I’m going to correct it.” He didn’t correct it. I said, “Obama, the problem is not you, the problem is who comes after you, who can use that decree to threaten us, sanction us or invade us.” And that’s what happened.

With Donald Trump we had the relationship that everyone knows. He took 930 sanctions measures against Venezuela. He put a price on my head, on this little head you see here, they put a price on it. They tried to kill me in 2018, August 4, from the White House they tried to kill me. The day of the drone attack they were in the White House, today that truth is known, waiting for the result of the attack. They tried to invade us several times, they prepared mercenaries from Colombia. And yet we always sought dialogue and had ties of dialogue with the Trump government, so much so that we almost had an exchange ready to free Alex Saab in those final days of Trump, before the elections. So when Biden arrives, too. We have always wanted a dialogue. I hope it progresses. Hopefully.

 We have done our best to establish a new era in relations with the United States.

IR: Are there planned stages?

NM: There are common ideas, there is a route, an established roadmap. But we could not say, Ramonet, that the United States has lifted any sanctions on Venezuela. On the contrary, the sanctions are in force. What the United States has given are licenses as if Venezuela were a US colony. Some licenses, like the time of the Guipuzcoan Company, which had complete control of this country and gave export and import licenses, right? At that time of the so-called white Creoles, until the white Creoles got tired of the Guipuzcoan Company and declared the independence of all of America. More or less something like that. The model that the United States intends to apply is a Guipuzcoan Company-type model against Venezuela. Giving license.

But we are very firm. And we say it to all the governments of Latin America, CELAC and the world: Venezuela demands the complete and permanent lifting of all illegal, immoral and criminal sanctions on the economy and society. All. And that is going to be our goal. And we are not going to rest, we are going to persevere as we always do until we achieve it. And on the way there, seeing the magic ball, I think we are going to achieve it.

 “The BRICS are the future of humanity”

IR: President, today is January 1st and as of today, the BRICS, that organization formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that have constituted a kind of new power or counterpower, a bit in line with what you mentioned before, about this new multipolar geopolitics. As of today, six new countries have joined or about to join. In fact, five specifically are incorporated: Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Because Argentina was to join but the new president Javier Milei declined the invitation. On the one hand, I would like you to give us your opinion on the importance of the BRICS. And on the other hand, if Venezuela could join these new expanded BRICS?

NM: The BRICS are the future of humanity, the BRICS are already a definitive economic power, they have a powerful bank, I was at the bank’s headquarters in Shanghai with its president Dilma Rousseff, we have good relations, moving forward, with the Bank of the BRICS. I couldn’t go to the South Africa Summit due to a very bad ear infection that I had, unfortunately. At the South Africa Summit, Venezuela was accepted as a partner. And I hope that at the next Russia Summit with the favor of God, always God ahead, Venezuela joins the BRICS+ as a permanent member.

We bet on the BRICS as part of that new world, the new world balance, as part of the Bolivarian geopolitical concept of a world of balance, a world of equals. And also as part of the future of humanity for the development of BRICS investments in Venezuela, for the development of large markets for Venezuelan products, for the development of multi-diverse relationships culturally, politically, institutionally, socially. They are great civilizations, the Chinese, Russian, Indian civilization, our sister Brazil, our sister South Africa, Africa! The five countries are great civilizations, and we are part of the mestizo civilization of South America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. So the BRICS fill us with emotion.

The step that Javier Milei has taken for Argentina is to take Argentina to the 19th century. I have been saying it. I say it to the Argentines and I say it to the world, the Milei project is a construct that they have created to get their claws into Argentina, take it out of the multipolar world, turn it into a vassal of the imperial unipolar world, and turn it into a new colony from South America, destroy the State, destroy its economy, destroy its identity; and the step she has taken to remove Argentina from that power that is the BRICS is one of the most clumsy and imbecilic things that Milei has done against Argentina. Because by removing Argentina from the BRICS he is acting against the Argentinians, against the Argentine worker, against the Argentine businessman. There it is demonstrated what a retrograde colonial project of the 19th century it is, a project that has failed since its inception. And it demonstrates what Bolivarian diplomacy is, world geopolitics, the new geopolitics that, from Venezuela, with our revolution we are carrying forward.
So I aspire sooner rather than later to go from being a member of the BRICS to being a full member of the BRICS.

 “What is being committed in Palestine has no name…”

IR: Mr. President, the world today lives impacted by two major conflicts: Ukraine and Gaza. Regarding Ukraine, from the first moment, Venezuela decided not to take sides, defending a diplomatic project to search for a negotiated solution. And regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict, since 2009 Caracas broke relations with Israel. Do you consider that Venezuela, in both cases, made the right decision? On the other hand, how do you see the evolution of these two conflicts?

NM: I think that these two wars are linked by the big business of the American military apparatus and the Israeli military apparatus, which are totally linked. The big owners of the American military apparatus are Israel’s investors. And I think that these two wars have benefited the manufacturers of blood, death, weapons.

A war is a threat against Russia… For two entire decades, Russia has been warning against the threat of the strategic trap that they were trying to make from Ukraine, and from the countries of Eastern Europe, and simply the attitude of the fachos [slang for arrogant and presumptuous people], the Milei of Ukraine, the fachos of Ukraine, and the entire confessed neo-Nazi group… They are confessed neo-Nazis, the entire group that stormed power in Kiev in 2014, what they did was put themselves at the service of the provocation strategy against Russia.

All wars should be avoided, and in the case of the war in Ukraine a peace solution should be sought, but they don’t want to look for it, they want to bring Russia to its knees and humiliate it. And at this point, Russia is winning the war against all of NATO, despite all its military spending. In the midst of an enormous effort because it has been sanctioned economically, President Vladimir Putin said recently, Russia won the economic war against sanctions, and Russia today has better economic indicators of growth, economic stability, and more economic flourishing than all of Europe, even than the United States, today. Which says the great internal strength of Russia as a power nation, a productive nation, of its economy. And the West is simply obsessed with Russophobia, with the idea of ​​destroying Russia. There is only one solution: to sit down and talk with Putin, with Russia, on the basis of respect and reach an agreement that satisfies the need to guarantee security and peace for Russia and the entire region.

In the case of the conflict in Palestine, there is no longer any doubt. It is a genocide against a people. A genocide that is more than seventy-five years old is now open, brutal. And there is practically nothing and no one to raise a voice. The worst thing about the genocide is the complicit silence that exists with this genocide. The complicit silence of the European elites. The complicit activity of American elites manufacturing weapons and weapons and weapons to bomb and kill innocent Palestinians. More than twenty-one thousand Palestinians murdered. Eleven thousand of them children. It seems that they went after the children, to exterminate them. More than six thousand women.

In truth, what is being committed in Palestine has no name, it is only comparable to the Jewish Holocaust itself that the Jewish people experienced in the time of Hitler, in the Nazi era. International justice should work. But we simply do not see the face of international justice. A genocide in broad daylight broadcast live and direct on social networks. And nothing happens.

We will see… because all these genocides, all these brutalities may not be paid for now, perhaps they will be paid for in the future. And the world that is emerging will one day pass judgment on all those who promoted this genocide today. We are supportive. Especially during this entire Christmas season. We have been very aware of the boys and girls of Palestine. There where the baby Jesus was born, Christmas could not be saved, Ramonet, on December 24 all the places in Bethlehem closed. And the manger with the baby Jesus surrounded by tanks. That is the symbol: the massacred child, Herod again. But we will see what the future holds for us in the struggle and resistance of the Palestinian people, and the struggle and resistance of our people.

 “Whoever wins the battle in the networks, in the streets, in the media, and on the walls, will win the battle of ideas, as Fidel said, will win the political battle”

IR: Mr. President, to finish, I would like to ask you a question that is outside of politics. Of all the presidents I know, you are the one who has reflected the most on the relationship with the media. You have a very successful television program that you recently launched, Con Maduro plus, and it is very present on the networks. What is your relationship with the media like? What objectives are you looking for? And what relationship do you think a leader should have with the media today?

NM: It is vital to be able to communicate. And as you explain it yourself, I heard it from you: we are in a new communication era. You explain it yourself, I have taken it as an example and explained it to our people. There have been five great communication moments in humanity.

The first when humanity, homo sapiens, began to speak and communicate by word, in all the places where homo sapiens existed on planet Earth. The second, when Homo Sapiens began to write. And we began to communicate through writing. First of symbols and then of writing, in China, in India, etc. Third, when the printing press came and then it was possible to write, and books and newspapers came out and a newspaper could circulate from one continent to another. Fourth, a communication moment closely linked to the 20th century, the emergence of cinema, radio, and television, which were dominant practically throughout the 20th century and part of the 21st century. Our commander Chávez was a master in the management of traditional media and was the initiator of the Twitter era, a master with @chavezcandanga, in the first massive social network that was Twitter.

And we are in a fifth communicational moment, decisive, total, dominant: that of social networks. Today, what is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and what is now called X to a lesser extent, and YouTube are the dominant social networks. Where people interact for hours, where people get informed, and where people communicate. Any human being in the most remote neighborhood of Caracas, of Shanghai, of Mexico City, of New York, at this hour that we are speaking, grabs their Instagram, grabs their TikTok, grabs their Facebook and sends a message. And many times it happens that that message goes viral. Sometimes it goes viral because of the content, the striking nature of what it releases. Other times it goes viral due to the algorithms of the owners themselves, of which they are invisible owners.

Before you knew who owned Venevisión here in Venezuela, who owned Televen, who owned I don’t know what radio station, the owner of “El Nacional”, Miguel Otero Silva, your friend. Now you don’t know where he lives, or who the owner is, who is the boss of TikTok in Venezuela. Where? Tell me. If you have a complaint, if TikTok did this, this and this against my family, where do I go? What law regulates it? That is a topic that must be studied.

That’s why I say we have to build a new system. I have told the people of Venezuela: we must build a new communication system, of permanent influence. And I have called it the RCMP system – Redes, Calles, Medios y Paredes [Networks, Streets, Media and Walls]. I’ll leave it there for you. And I make my effort, I make my contribution to keep a TikTok alive, active, attractive with things to maintain my other social networks, to maintain a different voice in those networks that transnational powers dominate, and to communicate on the networks. But we cannot stop there, we must continue communicating in the streets, and in traditional media, and on the walls, so that the walls also speak.

So it is a vital issue of the new era that must not be neglected, it is a priority. Whoever wins the battle in the networks, in the streets, in the media, and on the walls, will win the battle of ideas, as Fidel said, will win the political battle, will win the cultural war. It is decisive.

 “Chavismo has not defined who will be the presidential candidate” but “This year 2024, the Venezuelan people are going to teach the oligarchic right a new lesson”

IR: Mr. President, last question: 2024 is going to be an exceptional electoral year in the world. There are going to be elections in almost seventy-five countries. More than 4 billion people will be mobilized for the elections. Elections in the United States, in Russia, in India, in Ukraine. In Latin America there are going to be elections in Mexico, in Uruguay, in Panama, in El Salvador, in the Dominican Republic…and also in Venezuela. The opposition has already nominated about nine candidates, it seems. And analysts take your candidacy for granted… So I would like to ask you if you will, in fact, be Chavismo’s candidate for the 2024 presidential election?

NM: What I can tell you is that it is still premature. The year is just beginning. Only God knows… No Diosdado, God. Let’s hope that the electoral scenarios of the process that will take place this year are defined, and I am sure that, with God’s blessing, we will make the best decision.

I am president not because I have an ego, so that one day I said: “I want to be president.” Or because I have blue blood. Either my last name Maduro, blue blood, masters of the valley, or I was born to be president, like these political scumbags of the rancid oligarchy, who believe they are predestined to be presidents because they have blue blood and a last name. I am of the man in the street, in life I have found ways to defend an idea, a cause, a project. And on that path we met the greatest teacher, the teacher of teachers, unforgettable our beloved commander Hugo Chávez, our father, a father for all, who built a project, brought back Bolívar, Bolívar once again. He brought Bolívar to the 21st century and turned it into a project of Patria Grande, into a project of the country, he turned it into the conscience of the people.

We, or at least I, I say we because I am part of a collective, I am part of a historical cause. I am not me, I am part of a historical cause, I am part of a national project, I am part of a powerful popular movement of millions of men and women. I am part of a team: the Military Political High Command of the Revolution. I do not owe it to myself, I do not impose an ego, a predestination. No. Why was I president? Well, because Commander Chávez, at a given moment, had to make a decision due to a very serious illness… And so it was, and the people ratified it in heroic elections, April 14, 2013. And then I underwent the tests of a brutal war, and when 2017 arrived – remember the guarimbas, four months of violence, coup attempts, attempts to kill me – we brought the Constituent Assembly. Peace was imposed with the Constitution in hand. And then we similarly won the gubernatorial elections. We gave what is called in Venezuela a “pela” to the entire united opposition. They had been emboldened. I remember Ramos Allup (of the Democratic Action party): “Of twenty-three governorships we are going to win twenty-five,” said Ramos Allup.

Of twenty-three we won nineteen… The largest and most important states in the country… Popular miracle, Chavista miracle. And then on December 10 of that year we won the mayoralties, 80% of the mayoralties. And in 2018, when 2018 dawned, we held a debate in the Venezuelan popular movement, in popular power, in the Great Patriotic Pole, in the glorious United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and for them I went again candidate. Because they decided it, not because I said, “I am predestined”, “I have blue blood”, “I am cooler”, “I am indispensable”.

So here, in this decision about my eventual candidacy in 2024, neither personal ambitions, nor individualistic ambitions, nor ego, nor blue blood, will never come before the interests of the country. And when the decision is made, whatever it may be, we will all go out to conquer… What I can tell you today, what I can tell you today, is that this year 2024, the people of Venezuela are going to give a new lesson to the empires of the world, to the oligarchic right, to the extremists, who will not forget it for decades.

The popular movement, the popular forces and our entire country are preparing for a great electoral victory and for a new time of revolution to come with the Simón Bolívar National Plan, and with the historical projects that Commander Hugo Chávez left us. I can assure you of that: 2024 will be a year of great triumphs that will open the doors to great achievements in the future for 2025 and beyond.

IR: Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. I just wish you a happy new year, and the best for you, for your family, for your country. Hoping for a new date next year.

NM: Sure. See you later. Happy New Year.

The Traditional World resists the Satanic Order

Par : AHH

A timely reminder of the spiritual war at play. This interview aged really well in the last month since it came out; the continued maintenance of an irrational Genocide which provokes the entire Islamic world of 2 Billion and places the Zionist entity at existential risk indicates atypical calculations are at work. This is largely NOT about economics such as the gas off Gaza, or mere geopolitics. It has morphed into a global war of ideology and for various factions even eschatology.

In the Holy Land of West Asia, it is the culmination of the Long War begun by Zionism in Basel of the 1890s and subsequently affirmed by the Anglo-Americans through Lord Balfour’s declaration. The current moment witnesses the necessary ritual Annihilation of the Palestinians for lebensraum, as was achieved with native Americans in the Americas or incessantly attempted with Slavs in east Europe.

The worldwide confrontation is not socialism versus capitalism, nor the White Man’s Burden, nor even the limited opposition of western Christianity to Islam and Orthodox Christianity. It is about Feudal Oligarchy versus Sovereignty.

Under which principles do we organize ourselves?? An amoral totalitarian individualism or the harmonious social community with security and stability steered by a protective state, no matter how imperfect? A universal diktat under the same single expansive boot since 1991, or the respectful tolerance of diversity and the God-given right to be different?

Thus the Multipolar Traditional world faces off with the Apartheid Satanic world. The latter is determined to cull all Others who do not submit to their “Rules-based International Order.” The Rest of Humanity fights for the right to be a respected and free Other, unhindered and uncontrolled by supremacists in any fashion. The Ukraine and Palestine are the two incandescent battlegrounds, for now.

Poutine : la Russie prévoit de produire plus d’un millier d’avions d’ici 2030

poutine avions

poutine avionsLa Russie prévoit de produire plus d’un millier d’avions d’ici 2030, a déclaré le président russe Vladimir Poutine. “Nous prévoyons

L’article Poutine : la Russie prévoit de produire plus d’un millier d’avions d’ici 2030 est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Vidéo : l’affaire Dupond-Moretti

La relaxe prononcée par la Cour de Justice de la République à l’égard d’Éric Dupont Moretti le garde des Sceaux a naturellement suscité une cacophonie de commentaires outrés ou approbateurs. Et comme d’habitude marquées par l’habituelle inculture juridique et judiciaire.… Lire la suite

Affaire Dupond Moretti : une justice politique encore et toujours

Comme d’habitude, l’analphabétisme juridique et judiciaire des élites politiques et médiatiques fait des ravages à propos de l’audience qui s’est déroulée devant la Cour de Justice de la République. Éric Dupond Moretti est présenté comme un corrompu poursuivi par des… Continue Reading

La Corée du Nord ferme plusieurs de ses ambassades dans le monde

rpdc ambassades

rpdc ambassadesLa République populaire démocratique de Corée (RPDC) a décidé de fermer définitivement son ambassade à Madrid, a rapporté le 1er

L’article La Corée du Nord ferme plusieurs de ses ambassades dans le monde est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Le gros-porteur civil russe Il-96-400M effectue son premier vol d’essai

avion vol

avion vol« Le premier vol réussi de l’Il-96-400M modernisé est une démonstration du plus haut niveau de compétences des bureaux d’études

L’article Le gros-porteur civil russe Il-96-400M effectue son premier vol d’essai est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Affaire Fillon : un mois pour le détruire, dix ans pour le juger

En novembre 2016, François Fillon fut, à la surprise générale, choisi pour représenter la « droite républicaine » à la primaire ouverte organisée par les LR. Tout le monde s’attendait au retour de Nicolas Sarkozy et les dispositifs politico-médiatico-judiciaires étaient… Continue Reading

Don de Bernard Arnault : merci not’ maît’, vous êtes trop bon

Nous devrions être fiers. Nous français, nous avons l’homme le plus riche du monde en la personne de Bernard Arnault. C’est ce que nous racontent les gazettes qui pensent amuser le bon peuple en relayant avec gourmandise les classements de… Continue Reading

Les BRICS accepte six nouveaux pays membres

brics membres

brics membresL’Argentine, l’Égypte, l’Iran, les Émirats arabes unis, l’Arabie saoudite et l’Éthiopie rejoindront les BRICS à partir du 1er janvier 2024.

L’article Les BRICS accepte six nouveaux pays membres est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Le sommet des BRICS a commencé

brics

bricsLe sommet le plus représentatif des BRICS de toute l’histoire de l’organisation a débuté à Johannesburg. Lors de cette 15e

L’article Le sommet des BRICS a commencé est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Lavrov est arrivé en Afrique du Sud pour le sommet des BRICS

lavrov brics

lavrov bricsLe ministre des Affaires étrangères Sergueï Lavrov est arrivé à Johannesburg, où il participera au sommet des BRICS, a rapporté

L’article Lavrov est arrivé en Afrique du Sud pour le sommet des BRICS est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Le forum Armée 2023 ouvre ses portes

armee2023

armee2023Le 14 août, le neuvième forum militaro-technique international annuel Armée 2023 ouvre ses portes en Russie. Environ 1500 participants russes

L’article Le forum Armée 2023 ouvre ses portes est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Poutine n’ira pas au sommet des BRICS en Afrique du Sud

poutine afrique

poutine afriqueDeux nouvelles ces jours-ci donnent une image claire de la difficulté avec laquelle le nouvel ordre mondial se dessine, toutes

L’article Poutine n’ira pas au sommet des BRICS en Afrique du Sud est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

L’Europe à un pas de l’effondrement de son industrie

industrie

industrieCe sur quoi les auteurs adéquats écrivaient depuis plus d’un an, au sujet duquel toutes sortes de russophobes se moquaient

L’article L’Europe à un pas de l’effondrement de son industrie est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Quand Éric Dupond Moretti s’intéresse à « la vie des autres ».

La droite sénatoriale vient une fois de plus de se déshonorer en apportant ses voix sénatoriales à Eric Dupond Moretti pour un projet de loi parfaitement scélérat. L’effondrement de la culture des libertés publiques chez ces gens, ouvre un boulevard à Emmanuel Macron pour installer la société de surveillance autocratique et antidémocratique dont il rêve. … … Lire la suite
❌