I haven't had time to be linking articles a bunch today, so I figured I'd do a couple that are particularly interesting:

I linked it already but I'm just gonna take some excerpts from NATO-Russia Proxy War – Revealing Signs of a Fading America: Michael Hudson by nakedcapitalism as I think it's quite interesting.

I'm just gonna summarize the questions from the interviewer in square brackets.

Hudson:

[Sanctions were put on Russia but they're boomeranging and provoking Russian aggression. What was the strategic goal if the sanctions aren't really working on Russia?]

The war isn’t against Russia. The war isn’t against Ukraine. The war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China, because the United States saw that the centre of world growth is not in America now that it’s deindustrializing. Following neoliberal policies since the 1980s has ended up hollowing out the US economy. And how on earth can the United States maintain prosperity if it’s lost the ability to do wealth creation?

The only way of maintaining prosperity if you can’t create it at home is to get it from abroad. And the attempt, beginning a year ago, by President Biden and by the US neocons, was to block Nord Stream 2, and failing that, to block all energy trade and other trade with Russia. So that the United States could monopolize it itself. One of the main tools for the last hundred years of US control of the world economy has been by the oil industry. Controlling world energy trade. Energy is the key to the GDP, the productivity of every country, and the thought of energy trade passing out of US control into that of other countries threatened the United States’ ability to turn off other countries.

So the provocation of war in Ukraine and the provocation of a US response has enabled the US to say, ‘look at how awful Russia is doing, it’s defending itself’. Defending itself against the United States is a declaration of war. Because it means that you are breaking away from the dollarized system, and so by the thought that other countries have the potential of becoming independent was viewed by the United States as a challenge to the United States’ ability to dictate their policies and to use dollar diplomacy to take control of their commanding heights.

The fear of the United States of course is that the environmental movement would be able to move to stop global warming by slowing the carbon fuels, oil and gas, and so by creating this crisis in Europe, the United States has greatly…it bases its foreign policy on accelerating global warming. Accelerating coal and oil as the fuels of the future. I think President Biden in Poland today is promising Polish coal to replace Russian oil. And American coal. That’s why President Biden has Senator Manchin from the coal industry lobby, as head of the environmental and energy agency.

So what you’re seeing is not the US backfiring and shooting itself in the foot by creating a world crisis. That’s the idea! Because it realizes that in the world crisis, energy prices are going to go way up, benefiting the US balance of payments. The oil companies that control the world oil trade, once they exclude Russia from it, agricultural crop prices will go way up, benefiting the United States as an agricultural exporter, especially if they prevent Ukrainian and Russian wheat exports. This is going to create a debt crisis for third world countries whose debts are coming due. And the United States can use this debt crisis to force them, or attempt to force them, if they go along with it, to continue privatizing and selling off their public domain to US buyers so they can sell off their patrimony in order to get the money to pay the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.

The US strategy is to create exactly the world crisis that you are presented as being accidental. You can be sure that these people read the newspapers enough to know that this is the obvious result of what they’re doing. Look at what they’re doing as deliberate. Don’t assume they’re dumb. They’re smart, they’re evil, but they’re not dumb.

...

[Saudi Arabia said it would use the yuan when trading oil with China. So the dollar has a competitor?]

Oil trade with China. Other countries are not going to do their trade in dollars because the United States can simply grab whatever dollar assets they have. If a country does something independent, as when Chile became, wanted to take control of the copper trade, under Allende, the United States can simply grab its money. When Venezuela thought to undertake land reform in the popular policy, the United States simply seized its money, and the Bank of England seized Venezuela’s gold. The United States simply seized Afghanistan’s foreign reserves before it seized Russia’s foreign reserves.

So all of a sudden, countries or afraid to keep, are afraid to use US banks, afraid to use any connection with the dollar, or to have anything available for the United States to grab, because that’s its policy now. That is what’s really driving other countries away. Even America’s allies must be frightened, because Germany is asking for its gold supply to be sent back to it from the New York Federal Reserve Bank in airplane loads.

...

[The dollar was already in some difficulty, but now we may see a domino effect of other countries not using the dollar and using another currency?]

The crisis is political. It’s not going with another currency. President Putin, in his speeches, said this war is not about Ukraine. This war is about restructuring the international order. And what that means is an alternative to the IMF. An alternative set of institutions to the World Bank. An alternative to the World Court. And an alternative to the US rules-based order, based on the United Nations rules for instance, but that can’t be done as long as the United States is a member of that group.

So it means that there’s going to be a new grouping of international organizations, of which the United States will not join because it won’t join any organization that it does not have veto power in. So you’re going to have two parallel paths. You’ll have a neoliberal financialized, debt-financed path in Europe and North America, and you’ll have an industrial capitalism evolving into a socialist path in China and the Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Block.

...

[What about Europe? Is the long term goal of Russia to break it away from NATO and the US?]

United States is thoroughly in control of European politicians. The only opposition to NATO and the US in Europe is the right wing. The nationalist wing. The left wing is fully behind the United States and has been ever since, really the National Endowment for Democracy and other US Agencies really took control of the left-wing parties throughout Europe. They’ve Tony Blairized the European left, the Social Democratic parties in Germany and the rest of Europe, the labour parties in England, these are not labour and not socialist, they’re basically pro-American neoliberal parties.

...

[Russia has lots of minerals and produces a lot of food, along with Ukraine. As well as gas and such. So won't we have food shortages and crises?]

That is the intention. You have to realize that this was anticipated. Without gas, already German fertilizer companies are going out of business because fertilizer is made out of gas, and if they can’t get their Russian gas, they can’t make the fertilizer, and if you don’t have the fertilizer, the crops are not going to be as prevalent and abundant as they were before. So all of this, you have to assume that, it’s so obvious, they knew this would happen, and they expect the United States to benefit from the cost squeeze that it’s imposing on food importers to the US benefit.

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