Saturday, July 11, 2020

BIDEN'S GLOBALIST ECONOMIC POLICY - KEEP THE AMERICAN WAR MACHINE GRINDING, BAILOUTS AND BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS, AMNESTY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED - Sound like Obamanomics???



This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.

Ortiz: Biden’s Economic Speech Hides Far-Left Policies that Would Make Pandemic Economy Permanent

Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden gives a speech to workers after touring McGregor Industries in Dunmore, Pennsylvania on July 9, 2020. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images
1:39

Alfredo Ortiz of Job Creators Network writes in FoxBusiness that voters should be wary of Joe Biden’s recent talk about economic nationalism, pointing out that in Biden’s long career, he has never come close to advocating for, much less achieving, such goals:
Voters shouldn’t fall for Biden’s economic nationalism act. Past performance is the best indicator of future success. And in 44 years in Washington, Biden never meaningfully achieved the economic nationalism goals he laid out on Thursday.
. . .
Thursday’s plan would amount to Solyndra on steroids. Yet Biden had the gall to attack President Trump’s Paycheck Protection Program that saved 51 million jobs and five million small businesses.  If voters want real insight into Biden’s economic agenda, they should look at the warning Bernie Sanders gave this week when he said that Biden would be “the most progressive president since FDR.” While the Biden campaign tricks the media into focusing on today’s populist address, the so-called Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force quietly released their own platform recommendations this week.
. . .
The “unity” platform sounds more like a socialist surrender. It includes Green New Deal-type mandates, a hybrid public option/Medicare-for-All health care plan and a web of labor regulations, including a $15 entry-level wage, mandatory paid leave, and the end of the right to work without paying union dues.
Read the rest of the article here.


Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A Country Is at Stake

 

BY VERONIKA KYRLENDO

Given the extraordinary pace of events in America and the world this year, it is not hard to imagine that a bystander — perhaps a bug-eyed alien who has been following the series "The Earth" — would be pleased with the dynamics of the show.  But he also would be puzzled at the rapid twists of the plot.  The U.S., for example, enters a 2020 season in all its might and glory, with the strong economy, where unemployment for everyone is low, where reduced taxes and regulations promise further growth, and the basic indices of economic activity spell "victory" for the funny-looking guy who made it happen.  Then — BAM! — a "deadly virus" hits — eh, unimpressive...the mortality rate would have been much higher for the sake of the show; 2 percent is a rookie number (would be even lower if the infected were not placed in the nursing homes).  Nonetheless, America goes into lockdown, losing trillions of dollars.  Unemployment soars.  Then — BAM! — massive protests accompanied by rioting, looting, arson, vandalism, and sheer violence erupt as a response to the incident of police brutality.  The whole system is declared evil and beyond repair.  The crime rate soars.  American flags are burned — not in Iran or North Korea, but in Washington, D.C.  Some parts of the country that were the envy of the world look like a war zone.  Whoa, a startled viewer would think — what just happened?
What is happening is that November gets closer, and the country finds itself in a situation that may be described with a mathematical catastrophe theory used to study discontinuous processes.  An example of a discontinuous process would be an arched bridge to which more and more weight is added.  At first, little effect is seen as the weight on the bridge is increased — the bridge begins to bend almost imperceptibly.  At a certain point, however, enough weight is added to the bridge that it collapses.  A sudden change in a discontinuous process is called a catastrophe. 
The American model right now has one active variable, the economic model, and one active parameter, a necessity to choose one out of two courses of its development.  Speaking scientifically, we have reached a divergence point that requires a system to follow one of the two possible paths that are mutually exclusive.  At this point, both of them are equally probable, and the system "freezes" — to land on one of the paths, it needs a push.  It is difficult to accurately prognosticate the system's behavior at this point, but one can model it.  Once the choice is made, the return to the divergence point is impossible — if you stand before the abyss, you may either walk around it or take a step into it.
Which paths lie before America?  The first one is presented — and has been practiced for the last 20 years — by the globalism aimed to secure America's leading place in monopolar world.  The main tools of it are supranational entities such as international organizations, multinational corporations, and financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.  Even though globalization has been pictured by academia and media as an endless pool of growth, opportunities, and progress, it has been marked by substantial shortcomings.  For example, under the new regime of enhanced financial mobility and power, with greater volatility of financial markets and increased risk, real interest rates have risen substantially.  This has discouraged long-term investment in new plants and equipment and stimulated spending on the re-equipment of old facilities along with a large volume of essentially financial transactions — mergers, buybacks of stocks, financial maneuvers, and speculative activities.  This explains why overall productivity growth in the member-countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development fell.  So did gross fixed investment, and so did GDP growth.  But the elites have done well despite the slackened productivity.  Because globalization has helped keep wages down, while increasing real interest rates, the upper 5 percent of households have been able to skim off a large fraction of the reduced productivity gains, thereby permitting elite incomes and stock market values to rise rapidly.  For the multinational corporations that shaped foreign policy by engaging in lobbyism, globalization has also been great.  One of their main objectives that they achieved was cheaper labor sources.  Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer problems, in authoritarian states.  Capital moves to such friendly investment climes, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less costly locale.  (That is why the MNCs have vocally opposed the Trump administration's escalation of trade tensions, tightening of immigration restrictions, and disruption of global value chains.)
For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story.  Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries.  In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose.  Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increased
The Trump administration disdains globalization and practices a healthy and much needed protectionism.  It withdrew from free trade and other deals and viciously attacked globalization structures nurtured by the previous administrations: U.N., NATO, WTO, International Criminal Court, and now WHO, which proved shockingly unprofessional and frankly hostile to the U.S. interests.
If Trump gets four more years as a president, he may get to the holy of holies of the economic globalism — the IMF and the World Bank — which will undoubtedly face a debt crisis due to the downfall of the world economy.  Ironically, the COVID-19 hysteria that became an act of desperation for the Democrats — whether it was a projected event or a natural crisis that would have been a shame to waste — now plays against the global financial leviathan and its masters.  According to none other than George Soros, the COVID-19 pandemic is a one-two financial punch for developing economies.  Not only has it put extraordinary pressure on budgets worldwide, but it has also caused a sharp exodus of capital from emerging markets.  JPMorgan Chase & Co. predicts that 1 in 5 emerging-market countries will default on their debt obligations — meaning that the core banks may collapse.  If some federal reserve banks fail, the government may nationalize them — but no doubt Trump would not save them, as Obama did in 2008.  That would fatally undermine the economic foundation of the Democrats for good; that's why Trump's victory is not an option for them.
If Biden wins, he, as a true O'Biden-Bama Democrat, will have to save the failing banking system by unprecedentedly increasing the national debt in a weakened economy.  The previous model that balanced emission with trade deals would not be possible to execute in a severely damaged global economy.  That is why Biden's victory would lead to a delayed catastrophe, but with lower chances of surviving it, because the condition of the country will deteriorate — his leftist policies will make sure of it.
The choice we as a country will make in November is clear: Trump and patriotism or Biden and globalism.  Development or decline.  It is just that simple.
Follow Veronika Kyrylenko, Ph.D. on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Image: Fox News via YouTube.

WALL STREET BANKSTERS KNOW HOW WELL OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER SERVED AND PROTECTED THEM DURING THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED.

 

A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”

 

In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.

 

“According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”

 

Wall Street, Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign

 
9 July 2020
Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign.
BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.
It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS.  THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to support his election.
Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.
According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled “Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.
Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The American Prospect article details her role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.
One particularly noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.
While the former drone missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.


WALL STREET BANKSTERS KNOW HOW WELL OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER SERVED AND PROTECTED THEM DURING THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED.

 

A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”

 

In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.

 

“According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”

 

Wall Street, Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign

 
9 July 2020
Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign.
BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.
It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS.  THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to support his election.
Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.
According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled “Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.
Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The American Prospect article details her role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.
One particularly noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.
While the former drone missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.

Josh Hawley: Counter China’s Plans for Dominance by Ending ‘Forever Wars’

 7 Apr 202020
2:34
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote on Tuesday that the only way America can counter Chinese domination is to end the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hawley said that the United States has focused more on the response to the coronavirus outbreak than the country’s engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he charged that America cannot respond to the Chinese Communist Party’s plans for “domination” by remaining involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is currently taking a backseat to the #COVID19 crisis, but let’s remember, the only way we are going to be able to focus on #China and counter Beijing’s plans for domination is to end the forever wars,” Hawley wrote. “Can’t have it both ways.”


Our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is currently taking a backseat to the #COVID19 crisis, but let’s remember, the only way we are going to be able to focus on #China and counter Beijing’s plans for domination is to end the forever wars. Can’t have it both ways https://twitter.com/hawleymo/status/1247188890445910018 




The Missouri populist’s commentary follows as he said that the country must remain “laser-focused” on preventing Chinese “domination.” He said that this proposal will involve revamping America’s military posture towards countering an increasingly aggressive China.
Hawley said this week:
China understands that the global pandemic is an inflection point. They are trying to turn this to their advantage. Make no mistake, they are still pursuing their global strategic ambitions. The need for us to laser focus on China’s economic and military ambitions is going to be more urgent once we beat this pandemic, not less.
Hawley’s commentary echoes his foreign policy vision, which he unveiled in November 2019 at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The senator’s foreign policy vision would replace the bipartisan foreign consensus that he called “progressive universalism” with a foreign policy that would benefit the interests of the American working class.
Hawley said that the “burden of this nation’s long wars had fallen disproportionately” on middle-class families.
He said during his CNAS speech that instead of engaging in further conflict in the Middle East, America should counter a rising and increasingly imperialist China, which threatens the freedom of those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He added that China has increasingly deployed soft power to pressure American corporations such as Disney and the NBA to “throw overboard free speech at the first sign of Beijing’s commercial pressure.”
Hawley said that “the point of American foreign policy should not be to remake the world, but to keep Americans safe and prosperous.”

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3

 

Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A Country Is at Stake

 

BY VERONIKA KYRLENDO

Given the extraordinary pace of events in America and the world this year, it is not hard to imagine that a bystander — perhaps a bug-eyed alien who has been following the series "The Earth" — would be pleased with the dynamics of the show.  But he also would be puzzled at the rapid twists of the plot.  The U.S., for example, enters a 2020 season in all its might and glory, with the strong economy, where unemployment for everyone is low, where reduced taxes and regulations promise further growth, and the basic indices of economic activity spell "victory" for the funny-looking guy who made it happen.  Then — BAM! — a "deadly virus" hits — eh, unimpressive...the mortality rate would have been much higher for the sake of the show; 2 percent is a rookie number (would be even lower if the infected were not placed in the nursing homes).  Nonetheless, America goes into lockdown, losing trillions of dollars.  Unemployment soars.  Then — BAM! — massive protests accompanied by rioting, looting, arson, vandalism, and sheer violence erupt as a response to the incident of police brutality.  The whole system is declared evil and beyond repair.  The crime rate soars.  American flags are burned — not in Iran or North Korea, but in Washington, D.C.  Some parts of the country that were the envy of the world look like a war zone.  Whoa, a startled viewer would think — what just happened?
What is happening is that November gets closer, and the country finds itself in a situation that may be described with a mathematical catastrophe theory used to study discontinuous processes.  An example of a discontinuous process would be an arched bridge to which more and more weight is added.  At first, little effect is seen as the weight on the bridge is increased — the bridge begins to bend almost imperceptibly.  At a certain point, however, enough weight is added to the bridge that it collapses.  A sudden change in a discontinuous process is called a catastrophe. 
The American model right now has one active variable, the economic model, and one active parameter, a necessity to choose one out of two courses of its development.  Speaking scientifically, we have reached a divergence point that requires a system to follow one of the two possible paths that are mutually exclusive.  At this point, both of them are equally probable, and the system "freezes" — to land on one of the paths, it needs a push.  It is difficult to accurately prognosticate the system's behavior at this point, but one can model it.  Once the choice is made, the return to the divergence point is impossible — if you stand before the abyss, you may either walk around it or take a step into it.
Which paths lie before America?  The first one is presented — and has been practiced for the last 20 years — by the globalism aimed to secure America's leading place in monopolar world.  The main tools of it are supranational entities such as international organizations, multinational corporations, and financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.  Even though globalization has been pictured by academia and media as an endless pool of growth, opportunities, and progress, it has been marked by substantial shortcomings.  For example, under the new regime of enhanced financial mobility and power, with greater volatility of financial markets and increased risk, real interest rates have risen substantially.  This has discouraged long-term investment in new plants and equipment and stimulated spending on the re-equipment of old facilities along with a large volume of essentially financial transactions — mergers, buybacks of stocks, financial maneuvers, and speculative activities.  This explains why overall productivity growth in the member-countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development fell.  So did gross fixed investment, and so did GDP growth.  But the elites have done well despite the slackened productivity.  Because globalization has helped keep wages down, while increasing real interest rates, the upper 5 percent of households have been able to skim off a large fraction of the reduced productivity gains, thereby permitting elite incomes and stock market values to rise rapidly.  For the multinational corporations that shaped foreign policy by engaging in lobbyism, globalization has also been great.  One of their main objectives that they achieved was cheaper labor sources.  Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer problems, in authoritarian states.  Capital moves to such friendly investment climes, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less costly locale.  (That is why the MNCs have vocally opposed the Trump administration's escalation of trade tensions, tightening of immigration restrictions, and disruption of global value chains.)
For the global majority, globalization has been a whole different story.  Income inequality rose markedly both within and among countries.  In the United States, despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose.  Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss — all increased
The Trump administration disdains globalization and practices a healthy and much needed protectionism.  It withdrew from free trade and other deals and viciously attacked globalization structures nurtured by the previous administrations: U.N., NATO, WTO, International Criminal Court, and now WHO, which proved shockingly unprofessional and frankly hostile to the U.S. interests.
If Trump gets four more years as a president, he may get to the holy of holies of the economic globalism — the IMF and the World Bank — which will undoubtedly face a debt crisis due to the downfall of the world economy.  Ironically, the COVID-19 hysteria that became an act of desperation for the Democrats — whether it was a projected event or a natural crisis that would have been a shame to waste — now plays against the global financial leviathan and its masters.  According to none other than George Soros, the COVID-19 pandemic is a one-two financial punch for developing economies.  Not only has it put extraordinary pressure on budgets worldwide, but it has also caused a sharp exodus of capital from emerging markets.  JPMorgan Chase & Co. predicts that 1 in 5 emerging-market countries will default on their debt obligations — meaning that the core banks may collapse.  If some federal reserve banks fail, the government may nationalize them — but no doubt Trump would not save them, as Obama did in 2008.  That would fatally undermine the economic foundation of the Democrats for good; that's why Trump's victory is not an option for them.
If Biden wins, he, as a true O'Biden-Bama Democrat, will have to save the failing banking system by unprecedentedly increasing the national debt in a weakened economy.  The previous model that balanced emission with trade deals would not be possible to execute in a severely damaged global economy.  That is why Biden's victory would lead to a delayed catastrophe, but with lower chances of surviving it, because the condition of the country will deteriorate — his leftist policies will make sure of it.
The choice we as a country will make in November is clear: Trump and patriotism or Biden and globalism.  Development or decline.  It is just that simple.
Follow Veronika Kyrylenko, Ph.D. on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Image: Fox News via YouTube.


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