Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
Is the Empire dying? I’ve been hearing people tell me that I witnessing the death whales of fascism finally being stabbed out, since before a lot of gen Z was born.
Control of the periphery is looking real shaky. Multipolarity is pretty much a fait accompli right now. The core of the empire itself is objectively crumbling. The institutions that mediate conflicts between internal concentrations of power have become completely incapable of doing anything. So there’s not going to be a correction to the trends unless something revolutionary happens.
Not to say the US empire isn’t still daunting in its hard and soft power. But boy did taking Russia off of SWIFT land with a wet fart. And it sure seems like the US military is a paper tiger from how their equipment has been performing to say nothing of NATO tactics.
That and they fucked up the sino-soviet split by putting Russia and China on the same side of an issue. That’s the greatest foreign policy win for the empire in the 20th century gone.
I was skeptical until tesla became a thing. In 2010 a friend wanted me to buy and i refused because it was so oviously a scam. Despite huge subsidies it has made a majority of its profits from bitcoin, wich is also a scam. Yet its worth a lot of money. The only way to explain it is that the rate of profit is low enough that most proffit is coming from risk rather than from the actual natural rate of profitthe us already deep into the canobalistic phase all societies end in.
So esentially we are living in the industrial equivalent of an agrarian crisis. unless something fundamental changes in our understanding of phisics the empire may colapse under a significant enough stocastic shock. And that treshold is only going to get smaller. In this analogy covid was the equivalent of the 1315 famine. Wich didnt cause a collapse but made it clear the collapse was imminent.
What we are seeing with ludicrously over valued companies like Tesla and cryptocurrencies is what Marx described as fictitious capital.
The US is not going to collapse from investor shock, its produces a huge surplus of food and oil, and the use of its military to enforce the dollar as the world’s reserve currency protects it from market crises since the whole world subsidises the federal reserve simply printing more money.
Prehaphs i wss not clear. The important part is not that the hogs are allocating funds to tesla is why they are doing it. Because the rate of profit is very low. This tells us that western societies are well into the canibalistic phase. This also means that the societies ability to resist stocastic shocks is decreasing.
In my analogy i mention the 1315 famine, a few years were a bit too wet. Grain yields fell a little and a lot of people died. The thing is that those climatic variations are very common but they only cause a famine when the rate of change in land productivity with respect to labor is low enough. This makes the society unable to react to these shoks that normally wouldnt be a problem. By 1315 standards of living had been on the decline for over a generatio(as they are now).
In the elite sphere it means wealth bexomes more concentrated class conciousnes and solidarty breaks down so that they are less wigling to coperate. And eventually it all inevitably ends in an orgy of cannibalism.
While the rate of profit plays a sligthly different role than the rate of chang in land productivity with respect to labor. It is also related to a societies ability to react to crisies and to how canibalistic its elites get.
We see more rash imperialist adventures, we see them eating europen industry, we see them play scams on each other more brazenly. Etc.
It also means that same military is less likley to adapt to changes because there is neither will nor enough unclaimed surplus for that. It means its not worth it to hold dollars because us investments ate not profitable.
Seems to be, but it’ll take a long time to go completely. It’s easy to over estimate the speed at which these things happen.
as a good friend of mine once said, “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.”
There’s that as well!
There are a lot of things going on that could result in the US losing a great deal of it’s power. NATO’s poor performance in Ukraine will likely greatly reduce their reputation for an invincible military. The US’s illegal seizure of funds from Russian oligarchs and from Afghanistan seems to have greatly reduced confidence in the dollar. The Yuan is seeing more and more use in international trade, and Saudi is thinking about letting countries use currency other than dollars to buy oil. The famines or near-famines caused by the war in Ukraine has greatly damaged NATOs already poor reputation in the Global South. And of course the US domestic economy is in free fall, with many people struggling just to afford bread and a roof, and hundreds of thousands of homeless. And hundreds of thousands is likely a severe undercount. Plus the GOP aligned states are leading an active genocide against trans people, with an estimate by Erin Reed suggesting there are at least 250,000 internal refugees fleeing state repression in the US, with many more unable to flee for financial or other reasons. The US is going to face an enormous social burden from Long Covid related disability which will likely continue to increase as more and more people are disabled by Covid complications. The US is trying to provoke a war with China despite having no way to pay for it, no confidence in the government at home, and no way to replace the access to manufactured goods that a war with China would result in. To say nothing of the nuclear apocalypse. Large swaths of the US south hit a wet-bulb temperature that was fatal to human life earlier in the summer. This was not predicted to happen for decades yet. Given the state of infrastructure in the US south, especially Texas’s grid, this may lead to a truly horrific mass death event in the near future, with a commensurately horrific refugee crisis as people flee the death zone.
There’s a lot of destabilizing factors in the US. The future is never certain, but it doesn’t look good for America.