By Prof Michael Hudson Global Research, September 03, 2020 Michael Hudson 31 August 2020

The U.S. is Saving the Financial Sector, not the Economy

Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the corona virus’s economic effects, I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in “the market,” meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers.

At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom? This age-old confrontation over how to deal with the unpaid rents, mortgages and other debt service is at the heart of today’s virus pandemic as large and small businesses, farms, restaurants and neighborhood stores have fallen into arrears, leaving businesses and households – along with their employees who have no wage income – to pay these carrying charges that accrue each month.

This is an age-old problem. It was solved in the ancient Near East simply by annulling these debt and rent charges. But the West, shaped as it still is by the legacy of the Roman Empire, has left itself prone to the massive unemployment, business closedowns and resulting arrears for these basic costs of living and doing business.

Western civilization distinguishes itself from its Near Eastern predecessors in the way it has responded to “acts of God” that disrupt the means of support and leave debts in their wake. The United States has taken the lead in rejecting the path by which China, and even social democratic European nations have prevented the corona virus from causing widespread insolvency and polarizing their economies. The U.S. corona virus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its income to creditors.

There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative.

But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above.”

Individualistic economies cannot do that. To the extent that they have a strong state, they are not democratic but oligarchic, controlled by the financial sector in its own interest, in tandem with its symbiotic real estate sector and monopolized infrastructure. That is why every successful society since the Bronze Age has been a mixed economy. The determining factor in whether or not an economic disruption leaves a crippled economy in its wake turns out to be whether its financial sector is a public utility or is privatized from the debt-strapped public domain as a means to enrich bankers and money-lenders at the expense of debtors and overall economic balance.

Continue reading “How an “Act of God” Pandemic Is Destroying the West”

5 September 2020

On August 20, the pro-Western Russian politician Alexei Navalny fell ill on a flight to Moscow. After he was transferred to a hospital in Berlin, the German government announced categorically that he had been poisoned with a “Novichok” nerve agent.

Politicians and media outlets in Western countries, and above all in Germany, have declared that the Russian government is responsible for Navalny’s poisoning and have escalated their calls for a confrontation with Russia. A certain pattern is repeating itself. An incident takes place and immediately it is declared by media outlets that Putin or Assad is responsible, requiring an immediate response.

NATO Begins Provocative Military Exercises on Russian Border

Even the most routine homicide case involves a great deal of investigation before the alleged perpetrator is publicly named. But in this case, the entire Western media immediately and unanimously concluded who was to blame.

see also: Novichok and Nonsense: From a post-factual to a post-logic world

Assuming that Navalny was poisoned, one would think there would at least be a range of suspects. Is it not possible that an individual or individuals could have poisoned Navalny not because they support the Putin regime, but because they oppose it?

Continue reading “German Imperialism and Alexei Navalny: zero Proof.. zero Logic.. but ”Lets All Attack Russia””

La directa.cat shared with thanks translation thefreeonline

by Ramon Sala at La_Directa
Journalist, pedagogue and activist in the animalist association Ferus.

The hunting season open in mid-August, starlings, tudons and herons can be killed. But the “fearsome” wild boar can be hunted with one excuse or another all year round, for example in the Collserola mountains (a ‘Natural’ Park) of Barcelona.

A sow, a female boar, can be fertile after eight months of the year and give birth twice a year to 5 to 7 piglets, of which the 12 suckling can survive 50 to 70 percent. In good conditions the population can increase up to 200 percent annually.

According to European studies, in the last twenty years the population of wild boars has multiplied by four or five times throughout the continent. In regions where there are complete ecosystems, the trophic pyramid tends to balance itself. There is no one speciesleft or missing. With industrialization, all of Europe is urbanized and abandoned fields and pastures remain. From the 50s or 60s the renaturalization of all Europe is a fact. We now have more forests than two or three centuries ago.

We lack herbivores that keep the formidable plant mass at bay but when we have protected a single species such as the goats of the Ports de Beseit, they destroy everything and die by the hundreds of diseases that spread exponentially when there is overpopulation.

Wild animals are all the rage – with the permission of poor Cachou, the TV news star – and the most you tuber is the wild boar. In Catalonia, they eat corn, cause 1,200 accidents a year, transmit an African plague to farms and are a reservoir of diseases that can pass to humans.

In the midst of a jumble of interests, misinformation and alarmism, the miraculous solution appears. Shooting ends the problem. In Europe, 4,000,000 wild boars are killed every year. Dumping 21,000 tons of toxic lead on the forests, waters, marshes and fields. The hunting lobby can be happy.

Continue reading “Wild Boar ‘Plague’ and How to resolve conflicts by Integral Rewilding”

Students Aren’t Learning About Nuclear Weapons. That’s a Major Problem.   BY CAROLINE DELBERT, SEP 4, 2020  from popularmechanics.com/

• Not enough young people have access to even the option of studying nuclear weapons dynamics, an industry report says.
• Nuclear weapons development continues around the world.

• The current nuclear risk workforce is aging out, with few interested in replacing them.
• At the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, innovation advocate Sara Z. Kutchesfahani says the vast majority of U.S. students don’t learn about nuclear weapons in high school, or even in most relevant college coursework. Kutchesfahani says that low level of knowledge, combined with industry factors, means the nuclear workforce itself is about to hit a critical state.

Continue reading “Students unaware of nuclear weapons and the existential threat that they pose”

International Deskdaily-bangladesh.com

A serving British soldier was arrested by the Royal Military Police on Monday after protesting in uniform against Britain’s support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war. Yemen-born Lance Corporal Ahmed Al-Babati was filmed in Whitehall outside the Ministry of Defence before being taken away by three military police officers.

Al-Babati joined the British Army in 2017. He described the British government as having “blood on its hands” with lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia. According to a report in the Telegraph, he is a member of the Royal Signals and vowed to blow a whistle every ten minutes to represent how often a child is said to be killed in the conflict.

Published: 12:26 27 August 2020   Updated: 15:32 27 August 2020

British soldier Ahmed Al-Babati

Continue reading “British soldier arrested opposing UK infants killing in Yemen war (Videos)”