Paul Jay
Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. Thank you to everybody who has clicked the donate button. And if you haven’t, maybe you might do it this time. If you’re watching on YouTube or our website, click the share button and subscribe and we’ll be back in a second with Michael Hudson.

U.S. household debt climbed to a record high of fourteen point six trillion dollars at the end of 2020 as mortgage debt surpassed 10 trillion for the first time. Now, the GDP of the United States is only around 21 trillion. Americans owe over 1.71 trillion dollars in student loan debt spread out among 44.7 million borrowers. That’s about 739 billion more than the total U.S. credit card debt. While defaults and payments have been halted due to the pandemic, I’m talking now again about student debt, there’s no plan yet for forgiving such debt in spite of promises from Biden and many others in the Democratic Party. Biden said during a CNN town hall that he would not forgive 50 thousand dollars through executive action, as urged by Senator Schumer and Warren, Biden said, I’m prepared to write off the ten thousand dollars debt, but not the fifty thousand because I don’t think I have the authority to do it. Well, a group of 17 state attorneys general called on Biden to forgive fifty thousand dollars in student debt loans per borrower through executive action, asserting he does have the authority to do so under the Higher Education Act.

On the other hand, beginning in mid-March 2020, the Federal Reserve initiated an aggressive policy of quantitative easing, which included the purchase of corporate bonds. Billions of dollars of corporate debt has been purchased by the Fed, mostly from major companies including Apple, AT&T, General Electric, Ford, Comcast, Microsoft and around 90 others, companies that probably didn’t even need their debt purchased. So the role of the state in forgiving debt is quite OK as long as it’s a major corporation and not a student. OK, I’ll admit the Fed policy is a little more complicated than I outlined, but the principle is clear. It’s not considered a systemic risk for corporations and banks to rely on the government to bail them out of debt. But it is a danger to the system for government to forgive family and student debt. Of course, it goes further than that. The system requires high levels of debt among the population for corporations and banks to continue to rake in massive profits and engorge the fortunes of the billionaire class.

Now joining us to talk about debt is Michael Hudson. Michael’s an economist, a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s also a former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. Thanks for joining us again, Michael.

Michael Hudson
Good to be here. Regarding your lead in, Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal recently saying the problem with the Federal Reserve is its buying junk bonds. It’s buying the bonds, as she put it, of some big corporations that can’t pay their debts. And she’s criticizing them. She pointed out that the entire financial system rests on debt because debt is the collateral for the banks. The banks’ assets are the debts of the people. So the Fed policy is aimed, ever since 2008, by somehow keeping the economy’s ability to pay its largest massive debts, real estate debts, intact by lowering interest rates to support the mortgage market. And if you support mortgage lending, then even if individual homeowners can’t pay their debts, they can at least sell them to somebody or a company that can afford to pay. So, the whole financial system is a pyramid resting on these debts.

Paul Jay
Let me just emphasize something you just said, because you kind of corrected me on something correctly, that the fact that these major corporations like Apple got their bonds and debt bought was a piece of it. But you’re right, the other piece, which actually developed maybe a little further after they started this program, is they’re now really buying tons of debt where the companies are practically insolvent and never could pay off this debt. As you call them, zombie corporations. Sorry, go ahead.

Michael Hudson
Well, imagine the Fed could have simply bought all the student debt from the government and then wiped it out. The Fed could have wiped it out. The fact is, if the government were to write down all the student debt, it wouldn’t cost the government a penny right now. And that wouldn’t cost the banks a penny because the debt is owed to the government and the government would simply be canceling a future source of revenue. And by canceling the student debt revenue, they’d say debt is a public need. Debt is what people need to get by. It’s a basic need, and so it deserves to be public as it is in England, China and most other developed countries. Only in the United States do you have education taking off at a rate that almost is approaching the inequity of health care and medical care here. That’s what makes America so different from every other industrial country and from China. And because of this heavy debt and health care and all the other expenses that other economies don’t have, that’s exactly why the United States isn’t able to pull out of the recession that we’ve been in for the last 13 years, since 2008.

Paul Jay
Would you say expenses they don’t have, individuals don’t have? They’re dealt with collectively, the health care and education. Yeah, I don’t think there’s an advanced capitalist country, industrialized country, in the world that doesn’t have more or less free higher education. Although I have to say that tuition rates in Canada have been going up with some seriousness. Not nearly at American levels. And student debt exists in Canada too, but again, not as bad as in the U.S..

Michael Hudson
That’s right. Canada is always about three years behind the United States. That’s the perception of Canada. When I worked with the State Department in Canada in 1979, we did test questionnaires on Canadians. What do you think of the future? And almost all Canadians thought their future was going to be what the United States had, but three years behind. And that’s become the basic administrative policy of prime ministers ever since.

Paul Jay
So let’s dig into what you just talked about, because the rationale for all this buying of both corporate bonds from the Apples of this world and now junk bonds, essentially, from companies that really can’t afford to pay their debts, is that this is systemically necessary because of the pandemic, because of the deeper recession. It acts as a stimulus. It stops a greater unraveling of the economy and so on. But all of that rationale would exist for student debt exactly the same way and even more because it would give so much stimulus on the consumer side. As I say, some of these companies that they’re buying their debt from are actually cash rich, like an Apple. They have debt for convenience. But the stimulus, far more stimulus would have come from relieving systemic debt. But the reason I think they don’t do it, and this is what I’m asking you, is because they don’t want people to have any notion that debt gets relieved by the government. They want people to consider that debt must always be paid.

Michael Hudson

In this wide-ranging discussion on the Moderate Rebels podcast, Hudson addresses US sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, the policies of the Joe Biden administration, Beijing’s economic model, cryptocurrencies, and dedollarization – the potential end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.

TRANSCRIPT

Ben Norton 0:03

Hello everyone, I’m Ben Norton. You’re watching Moderate Rebels. And there will be a podcast version of this after, for people who want to listen. We are joined today by the economist Michael Hudson, one of the most important economists in the world, honestly, in my view.

I don’t think he needs introduction. He has written many books, and has been an economic adviser for multiple governments, and has a long history on Wall Street and academia. And you can find his work at Michael-Hudson.com.

Today, we’re going to talk about an issue that Michael Hudson has been writing about for decades, and something that you’re never really going to hear from other economists, especially mainstream neoliberal economists, and that’s what he calls super imperialism.

The US government has of course its military apparatus, which we talk about a lot here at Moderate Rebels and The Grayzone, with the war in Iraq, the war in Syria, the war in Libya, but then there’s also the economic form that imperialism takes. And Michael Hudson wrote the book “Super Imperialism” that details exactly how this system works.

So today, Michael Hudson, I want to start just talking about what super imperialism looks like today, in the new cold war. This is something that we talk a lot about.

We saw that Joe Biden gave his first major speech to Congress – we’re not supposed to call it a state of the union because it’s still his first year – but Biden gave a joint speech to Congress in which he declared that the United States is in competition with China to own, “to win the 21st century,” as he put it.

And we’ve seen that the US government, under Biden, and of course before under Trump, has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Russia and on China.

So Professor Hudson, let’s just start today talking about what you think the posture has been of the Biden administration, vis a vis Trump. We saw that the Mike Pompeo State Department essentially declared a kind of new cold war on China. Pompeo gave a speech at the Richard Nixon library in which he said that the famous Nixon visit to China was a mistake, and that we have to contain China and eventually overthrow the Communist Party of China.

And some Democrats hoped that the Biden administration would kind of take a step back. But we’ve seen that the Antony Blinken State Department has continued many of these aggressive policies, accusing China of genocide.

And we’ve seen that the Treasury Department just imposed several new rounds of sanctions on Russia. So what is your view on the new cold war that’s going on right now?

Michael Hudson 2:57

Well, I had originally wanted to call my book “Monetary Imperialism.” The publisher wanted to call it “Super Imperialism,” in 1972, because it was really the US moving towards a unipolar order, where it was not competing with other imperialisms; it wanted to absorb European colonialism, absorb European imperialism, and really be the single unipolar power.

And of course that is what really has come about. The United States is trying to become the only dominant power in the world. And in today’s Financial Times [on May 5], one of the reporters said, it’s as if the United States wants to be the world’s absentee landlord, and rent collector. So we’re dealing with a monetary and a rentier phenomenon.

And when Biden gave his speech last week, there was a very marked change, right in the middle of it. The very beginning was very calm, offering means of improvement for the American economy, and a set of proposals that were so wonderful that they don’t have the chance of being enacted. And that was simply to co-opt what calls itself the left wing of the Democratic Party, if that’s not an oxymoron.

And then all of a sudden, his body language changed, his voice changed, and there was just an anger towards Russia and towards China, a visceral anger that brought back the whole 30 years of his tenure in Congress. And he was the leading cold war proponent, the leading proponent of the military, and of course now he wants to increase the military budget.

So while on the one hand, he’s continuing the nationalistic trade policies of the Trump administration, he’s escalating the cold war against Russia and China, in the belief that somehow if he can impose sanctions and punish them economically, that will lead to a fall of the government. Well, you can see what he’s projecting here.

It’s obvious that the United States economy is going to be in real trouble. Once the Covid crisis stops uniting the country in a feeling that we’re all in this together – and certainly in New York, where I live, in August, the freeze on real estate evictions, by renters, and foreclosures on mortgagees is going to end, and it’s expected there will be 50,000 New Yorkers thrown into the street. They’ve very kindly decided to postpone this until August, so at least they can sleep in the park, and don’t have to begin sleeping in the subways until maybe October.

There’s no way that any Wall Street economist that I know can see if the economy is really going to recover. The stock market is going way up, thanks to a Federal Reserve policy of subsidizing bonds and stocks, with 83% owned by the 1% of the population. But the Federal Reserve is not backing any spending into the actual economy.

Well that’s where the first part of President Biden’s speech came in. He was talking about building infrastructure and somehow reviving the economy. But it doesn’t look like he’s going to get much support from this from the Republicans, and he wants to be bipartisan.

In other words, he says the Democratic Party, as always, won’t do anything that Republicans wouldn’t agree on. Because the Democrats are an arm of the Republican Party. Their role is to protect the Republican Party from left-wing criticism.

So you can expect a wishy washy sort of slow decline with a few rapid spikes in decline as the Covid crisis ends. And you’re having almost a preparation for this by – I think Biden and the government people realize that the economy cannot regain its former industrial position, because it’s a rentier economy now.

Money is not made by companies investing in industry and factories and means of production. When companies do make profits, they are largely monopoly rents, or resource rents, or other forms of rent extraction.

And 90% of corporate income in the United States is spent on share buybacks and dividend payouts, not on investing in new production. So nobody’s really expecting new private investment to occur in the United States, that is private capital investment in means of production.

Guests Michael Hudson & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: April 21, 2021 (transcribed May 3, 2021):

Jim Vrettos:
So, Michael, Jonathan. Thank you so very, very much for being here. Jonathan, you’re from… We’re looking at you from North Carolina there and Michael is in Queens. You’ve both had tremendous influence in your respective fields. Spiritual economic activist and so on. What do you make of the contradictory statements in the news, particularly… particularly… Let’s start with the idea of the movement by the Biden administration given parameters of its neoliberal roots. Do you believe that they have the commitment and vision commensurate to Roosevelt’s build of economic whites in 1944 and the attempt to broaden the conception of social justice and democracy [inaudible 00:08:36] In other words, what do you make of the first 100 days or so? Let’s start with Jonathan. Are we moving in the right direction? Which narrative do you think is going to win out here in America? Economic-

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove:
Jim, it’s good to be with you. Thanks for having us. I’m delighted for the chance to engage here with Michael. I come at the question you’re asking from the perspective of the Poor People’s Campaign. For the last three years, we’ve been organizing people across this country who were already in their communities doing grassroots work to raise an alarm about the way that the current economy isn’t working. You mentioned that 140 million people were living in poverty or were low wealth before the pandemic and the pandemic that we’ve experienced for the last year has, in many ways, exposed the fissures in the economy.

We had a huge package under the previous administration, where the vast majority of the investment from the government went to corporations and to banks. The result of that was that we saw the wealthiest people get much wealthier while unemployment on the bottom has stayed very high and the people who earn often less than a living wage are the people who have suffered the most. Incidentally, those are also the people who have been on the front lines and most vulnerable to this coronavirus. All the research that we have now says not only are African Americans three times as likely to get it as their white neighbors, but poor people are three times as likely to contract as their wealthier neighbors. And so, in many ways, I think this world altering experience that we’ve all lived through has exposed the lies of the neoliberal system and the way in which we’ve gone on believing for far too long. That if the economy is doing well, the people are doing well. Well, that’s just not true.

And so I think the Biden administration has successfully passed one piece of legislation that, at the very least, did put more of the investment in the hands of people at the bottom of the economy. And so I’ll give him credit for that. But that’s only temporary and it’s only confined to COVID relief. Frankly, we need to reimagine the whole economy. Because the Poor People’s Campaign has been saying and saying clearly, in the words of the people who experience it directly and with the support of evidence from economists and sociologists who we’ve worked closely with, that when we lift the bottom, that’s when everybody can rise. And so we need economic investment that is designed to lift from the bottom. I hope and pray we can push this administration towards more of that.

I would say, just in terms of your question about how it compares to FDR, that FDR was no radical, but there was a movement that pushed him. Part of that movement was very faith-based. Frances Perkins was a product of the Social Gospel movement. She came up in Chicago, when she was getting educated, watching the settlement houses and those great Black churches of the Black social gospel in Chicago that were committed to the message of Jesus. The good news to the poor. She was determined to implement that through the Roosevelt administration. Now, they didn’t get anywhere near everything they were trying to get, but nevertheless, we did hammer out some very real universal policies that guaranteed the basic necessities of life. Things like Social Security. That’s an, I think, incredibly important piece of our history that is widely accepted and appreciated now, but when it was proposed, it was called radical. It was called Marxist. It was called all the things that these ideas get called now. So, I think it’s important to remember that history as we push together for economic activity that lifts from the bottom.

Jim Vrettos:
Great. Michael, do you want to comment on what Jonathan just said there?

Michael Hudson:
I agree with everything Jonathan has said. I think he’s put it very clearly. One comment I had… He talks about the good thing that the Biden administration has done is provide relief for the poor, but this relief went right through their hands. The vast majority of the relief was not a stimulus. It was a relief, as he pointed out, and it’s temporary. Most of this money was simply paid to the banks and to the landlords. It was paid for the rent arrears, especially by people who were unemployed and it was paid to write down credit card debt. In many cases, the relief was paid directly into the bank accounts or the other accounts of the poor. The poorest people didn’t get any of the relief because they don’t have bank accounts and they don’t have addresses because they’re already joining the homeless. Here in New York. Of course, the problem is that there’s going to be a huge wave of homelessness when the freeze on evictions of families behind in their rent expires. Landlords have already begun to illegally evict many of people who’ve been unable to pay their rents. They don’t have enough money to draw on their bank accounts to do this. So, that is very unfortunate.

Jonathan mentioned Frances Perkins and the gospel. The word gospel meant, literally, the good news, but wherever it was used in the Bible, as Sharon Ringe, a Lutheran historian has pointed out, it always was used as a code word for the Jubilee year. For the clean slate. The only way that you can really liberate the people who’ve been pushed way behind the eight ball by the virus is to say, okay, the economy is taking a pause. You don’t have to pay the rents that have accrued when you’re unable to do that. You don’t have to pay the debts that have accrued when you’re unable to do this. Because, otherwise, there’s not going to be a recovery. How on earth can you recover if most of the people have to now, all of a sudden, pay up all the arrears that they’ve been accumulating during the pandemic and, not to mention that, long before? It can’t be done.

The other comment I have… Jonathan said the economy hasn’t been working. What has been a bonanza for the five percent! And even more of a bonanza for the one percent. The top one percent of the population has made more money since the pandemic began… as much money as than they made since 1980. Economic crises are always a bonanza for the wealthy because they get to profit from the distress of others. What you call distress is for them a wonderful marketing opportunity. Wall Street has been incorporating all sorts of private capital funds to make a killing once the arrears come due. They’re planning on residential property at a discount as they did after 2008. Buying commercial property at a discount. They’re looking to make a killing, which is what usually happens in the aftermath of a crisis. So, the Biden administration has given a palliative. The palliative has helped mainly the creditors and the landlords so far with not much being used by the people and the economic activity that’s picked up is mainly by people who can afford it, which is not the constituency that Jonathan and I are talking about.

Jim Vrettos:

Transcript

Jussi: Welcome Michael. I just give a brief overview of the agenda and then I get back to you with a few questions.

I just show you this picture, what we want to do today is this: Today we will get a long-term view on money debt and the economy, including the different power struggles over the ages. We start from 2400 B.C. until today. It goes through Babylonia and Sumerian time to biblical times, Roman and medieval banking, to today. That’s a quite big thing to cover but we have the right man with us: Michael. I just say a few words first.

Michael has been an advisor to governments, he is an expert on financial and real estate markets and actually history too of debt and money and the economy, which is the reason why he is here today. He predicted the Latin American debt crash in the 1980s and the crisis of 2008.

Today’s topic: 40 years of research into the origins of money, debt and how the economy was organized way, way back. This kind of research is not like reading a book, because those were written in clay tablets, so Michael’s research has been a very big thing.

Michael, could you please introduce yourself, let’s take three of your defining moments that you like to share in your career. If we start with the first one with the Chase?

Michael: Well, my first major job on Wall Street was becoming the balance of payments economist for Chase Manhattan, and the very first task they gave me, in late 1964, was to look at the balance of payments of their three major Latin American creditors: Argentina, Brazil and Chile, to see how much they can afford to borrow. My job was to say: here is how much of an export surplus they can raise for and exchange for.

The idea of the New York banks, was that all of the economic surplus would be paid for debt service, so that everything that they could export to create a trade surplus, an investment surplus, a tourism surplus, etc., if you put this all together, they’re generating say two billion dollars a year, all of that can be paid as interest. You calculate: how much will two billion dollars pay in interest, how much of a loan can that support, and say: that’ll be maybe a 20-billion-dollar loan.

I did my forecasts: here is the trade balance, the tourism balance, the investment balance and they weren’t generating any surplus. So, I said: wait a minute, how are they going to repay more interest if they’re not generating an economic surplus to pay in the first place.

You can imagine that this did not make me popular with the international division within the bank, because bank officers get paid according to how many loans they can make because that’s what the bank’s business is: making loans. If I said: wait a minute, they can’t afford to repay, I was called doctor doom, already in the 1960s.

We had one meeting with the federal reserve at a later point and they said: Mr. Hudson, according to your analysis, Britain can’t pay any additional loans? And I said: that’s pretty obvious, I think that the pound is going to be devalued. They said: but we’re always going to lend Britain the money to pay, aren’t we? And I said: that’s right, if the federal reserve and the US government lends Britain the money to pay the interest to keep itself, then they can do it. And the fed guy said: then we can lend the Latin American governments if they’re friendly governments.

In other words: we will lend the dictators and the client oligarchies money to pay, but if they were to vote for somebody we don’t like, then we’ll call in all the loans, strangle the economy, block them from importing, devalue the currency, create a crisis, to say: that’s what you get for not voting for our guys.

You want to try democracy? This is the free market where we get to bankrupt you if you don’t like it.

They said: it’s not a bad thing that the government makes loans, because we can control them, we can make sure that if they elect anyone we don’t like, anyone who wants land reform, anyone who wants independence, anyone who won’t privatize their oil and their natural resources, you can just absolutely destroy them.

I said: Okay, I get it, if you lend them the money, then they can pay.This is like a Ponzi scheme: you lend the investors enough to pay the interest and keep current. That was my introduction to how the balance of payments worked between the United States and the third world and how political the whole credit problem was.

David Rockefeller had taken over the bank from George Champion, who had said around 1963-64 that the Vietnam war was fiscally irresponsible because it was ultimately going to force us off goal.

My boss at Chase, John Deaver, said: “That’s the merchants of death argument in reverse, you’re saying we can only vote for a war that we can afford. That’s wrong: we have to do what’s right; we have to fight communism everywhere! What is communism? Communism is nationalism, the opposite of democracy, communism is voting for somebody we don’t like. Even if we can’t afford it, we’ve got to do it!”

So, now the rest of us at the economic research department dealt with what the war meant. Every Thursday evening the Federal Reserve came out with a balance sheet of currency money, currency and gold. Under the gold exchange standard, Every dollar of paper currency, every green bill in your pocket had to be backed 25% for gold.

We were watching the balance of payments deficit was draining, and draining, and draining foreign exchange that was cashed in for gold by general de Gaulle in France, by Germany etc. At a certain point the dollar was going to have to stop gold convertibility.

That was the other thing that we were watching: monetary theory is supposed to be all about money being spent on goods and services. But the entire balance of payments deficit of the United states since 1950, was to pay for the war in southeast Asia and for the 800 military bases that America had around the world.

The key to the balance of payments was the military. It didn’t have anything to do with America’s prices and wages and all the things that academics talked about. It was what the academic theorists leave out: we are the gun votes. That was my first experience.

Jussi: What you’re saying is that the US had to get out of the gold standard because it made itself to be a Latin American country with US dollar loans?

Michael: That was what their worry was. But my book Super Imperialism showed just the opposite: The gold actually became a key to American dominance. But at the time they were very worried about going off gold.

There was a Columbia university group at that time of three people: my mentor Terence McCarthy, Seymour Melman, critic of the pentagon, and myself. We were the three warning that the balance of payments of the war was going to force the government off gold.

I had to leave the bank to finish my dissertation, because they kept giving me more and more work, which is what economists would have. And I got my PhD as a union card.

Then I developed a whole balance of payments accounting format at Chase. I went to Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm. Before they were closed down for fraud, they were a major accounting firm. I said I want to do my analysis for the whole US of its balance of payments. I worked for a whole year putting the US balance of payments together. That’s when I found the entire deficit was all military.

Nearly half a millennium ago Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince described three options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that “have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom: … the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you.”[1]

Machiavelli preferred the first option, citing Rome’s destruction of Carthage. That is what the United States did to Iraq and Libya after 2001. But in today’s New Cold War the mode of destruction is largely economic, via trade and financial sanctions such as the United States has imposed on China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other designated adversaries. The idea is to deny them key inputs, above all in essential technology and information processing, raw materials, and access to bank and financial connections, such as U.S. threats to expel Russia from the SWIFT bank-clearing system.

The second option is to occupy rivals. This is done only partially by the troops in America’s 800 military bases abroad. But the usual, more efficient occupation is by U.S. corporate takeovers of their basic infrastructure, owning their most lucrative assets and remitting their revenue back to the imperial core.

President Trump said that he wanted to seize Iraq’s and Syria’s oil as reparations for the cost of destroying their society. His successor, Joe Biden, sought in 2021 to appoint Hillary Clinton’s loyalist Neera Tanden to head the government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). She had urged that America should make Libya turn over its vast oil reserves as reparations for the cost of destroying its society. “We have a giant deficit. They have a lot of oil. Most Americans would choose not to engage in the world because of that deficit. If we want to continue to engage in the world, gestures like having oil rich countries partially pay us back doesn’t seem crazy to me.”[2]

U.S. strategists have preferred Machiavelli’s third option: To leave the defeated adversary nominally independent but to rule via client oligarchies. President Jimmy Carter’s national-security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to them as “vassals,” in the classical medieval meaning of demanding loyalty to their American patrons, with a common interest in seeing the subject economy privatized, financialized, taxed and passed on to the United States for its patronage and support, based on a mutuality of interest against local democratic assertion of nationalistic self-reliance and keeping the economic surplus at home to promote domestic prosperity instead of being sent abroad.

That policy of privatization by a client oligarchy with its own source of wealth based on the U.S. orbit is what American neoliberal diplomacy accomplished in the former Soviet economies after 1991 to secure its Cold War victory over Soviet Communism. The way in which client oligarchies were created was a grabitization that utterly disrupted the economic interconnections integrating the economies. “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires,” Brzezinski explained, “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”[3]

After reducing Germany and Japan to vassalage after defeating them in World War II, U.S. diplomacy quickly reduced the Britain and its imperial sterling area to vassalage by 1946, followed in due course by the rest of Western Europe and its former colonies. The next step was to isolate Russia and China, while keeping “the barbarians from coming together.” If they were to join up, warned Mr. Brzezinski, “the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power.”[4]

By 2016, Brzezinski saw Pax Americana unravelling from its failure to achieve these aims. He acknowledged that the United States “is no longer the globally imperial power.”[5] That is what has motivated its increasing antagonism toward China and Russia, along with Iran and Venezuela.

The problem was not Russia, whose Communist nomenklatura let their country be ruled by a Western-oriented kleptocracy, but China. The U.S.-China confrontation is not simply a national rivalry, but a conflict of economic and social systems. The reason why today’s world is being plunged into an economic and near-military Cold War 2.0 is to be found in the prospect of socialist control of what Western economies since classical antiquity have treated as privately owned rent-yielding assets: money and banking (along with the rules governing debt and foreclosure), land and natural resources, and infrastructure monopolies.

This contrast in whether money and credit, land and natural monopolies will be privatized and duly concentrated in the hands of a rentier oligarchy or used to promote general prosperity and growth has basically become one of finance capitalism and socialism. Yet in its broadest terms this conflict existed already 2500 years ago. in the contrast between Near Eastern kingship and the Greek and Roman oligarchies. These oligarchies, ostensibly democratic in superficial political form and sanctimonious ideology, fought against the concept of kingship. The source of that opposition was that royal power – or that of domestic “tyrants” – might sponsor what Greek and Roman democratic reformers were advocating: cancellation of debts to save populations from being reduced to debt bondage and dependency (and ultimately to serfdom), and redistribution of lands to prevent its ownership from becoming polarized and concentrated in the hands of creditors and-landlords.

From today’s U.S. vantage point, that polarization is the basic dynamic of today’s U.S.-sponsored neoliberalism. China and Russia are existential threats to the global expansion of financialized rentier wealth. Today’s Cold War 2.0 aims to deter China and potentially other counties from socializing their financial systems, land and natural resources, and keeping infrastructure utilities public to prevent their being monopolized in private hands to siphon off economic rents at the expense of productive investment in economic growth.

The United States hoped that China might be as gullible as the Soviet Union and adopt neoliberal policy permitting its wealth to be privatized and turned into rent-extracting privileges, to be sold off to Americans. “What the free world expected when it welcomed China into the free trade body [the World Trade Organization] in 2001,” explained Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr, trade advisor in the Reagan administration, was that, “from the time of Deng Xiaoping’s adoption of some market methods in 1979 and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 … increased trade with and investment in China would inevitably lead to the marketization of its economy, the demise of its state-owned enterprises.”[6]

But instead of adopting market-based neoliberalism, Mr. Prestowitz complained, China’s government supported industrial investment and kept money and debt control in its own hands. This government control was “at odds with the liberal, rules-based global system” along the neoliberal lines that had been imposed on the former Soviet economies after 1991. “More fundamentally,” Prestowitz summed up: