EMPIRES IN CRISIS

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COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE US AND RUSSIA IN 1917

The subject of today's lecture is a political analysis of where America is in history in the summer of 2021.  We use a comparison with Russia in the summer of 1917.  Trump was thrown out of office. The Republicans also lost control of the Senate so you have a kind of equivalent of the provisional government in Petrograd running the country

Now here's where things just don't look very encouraging. The Democratic rule of America is very similar to the provisional government's weak grip on power in 1917 and it's also similar to the fact that the provisional government simply didn't have the vision and the guts to deal with the primary problem that Russia faced, which was the commitment to a disastrous war that was lost and a willingness to capitulate to the demands of the so-called "democracies," England, America and France, which continued to use Russian soldiers as cannon fodder for their political goals. Here in America we have a different set of problems. History repeats itself but it doesn't repeat itself exactly.

AMERICA IS AN UPSIDE DOWN DEBT PYRAMID

One of the biggest problems is the financial disaster of modern America. Modern America is an upside-down debt pyramid. Like many failed states, America has been unwilling to deal with its problems and has just continued to run up larger and larger and larger amounts of debt. This is private debt as well as public debt because a manipulation of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve has fuelled an enormous explosion in private as well as a lack of proper regulation has encouraged Wall Street to replace Equity with debt, creating a much more unstable basis for American Business. Now when the Coronavirus crisis hit in 2020, the system basically failed and 600,000 people ended up getting killed as a result of government incompetence and irresponsibility, meanwhile trillions upon trillions were borrowed in order to prop up a failed system so the debt squeeze was raised to an astronomical level. There were trillions of dollars created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve, a large part of which went to the rich on Wall Street and there were trillions of dollars run up of debt by the federal government.

BIDEN CONTINUES TO GROW US DEBT

Now when Biden came in, he ran up more debt in the so-called Recovery Act, which was filled with hundreds of billions of dollars of pork barrel projects.  That in itself is a warning sign of how things are coming along. Today, Biden is trying to peddle a 3 trillion dollar increase in spending on one project and then a one trillion dollar increase in spending on another. There was some tax increases. The tax increases were very badly conceived, basically being aimed at investment by the wealthy.

In other words, there is a refusal to confront the American people with the scale of the problem.  In order to deal with the fiscal crisis and the needs for healthcare and climate change, there must be a national call for sacrifice. And yet this is not happening. So this is not a viable approach.  The Biden plan to just enormously increase debt is not a viable approach and also fairy tale theories have been cooked up: modern monetary Theory, cooking money out of thin air, astronomical estimates of uncollected taxes that are going to magically be collected.

This is a sign of a failed state, where people believe in delusion but the important point to understand is that the plans that are being proposed are not going to work.

WHAT DOES REAL REFORM LOOK LIKE?

Now what does real reform look like?  Real reform first means getting national health insurance.  That's the heart of the matter and that has been completely ignored by Sanders 3 trillion dollar capitulation. So that's not happening.  There needs to be a plan for climate change.  That's not happening.  This is just a confused hodgepodge.

Meanwhile war policies are being continued that can get us into a war with China.  That obviously needs to stop.

None of this is happening. What we will have is an increasing level of instability which will pave the way for an authoritarian solution to the situation which we have discussed over the long term.