RE: [A-List] Michael Hudson's Super-imperialism (euro)

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

<snip>the Iraq war was NOT fought out of fear that the dollar would be
dethroned. It was good old-fashioned imperialism - grabbing the oil
supplies, grabbing the military territory surrounding key areas (with
Iran being the key to control of that part of the world), dismantling
the shreds of the USSR and breaking them irreversibly away from Russia,
and surrounding China. Secondarily, the objective was to show any
country that if it didn't knuckle under to US demands, it would be
destroyed like Iraq. The entire intention was to destroy Iraq as an
object lesson, something like the Romans lining up enemies and
decimating them, that is, killing every tenth man. Demonstration effect
is what these guys are after as well as specific geopolitics. <snip>

If this is their motivation, they may be the only ones in the world,
aside from some feint-hearted metropolitan pacifists, who believe it.
While your point about a limitless balance of payments deficit is well
taken, their ability to get away with that is not merely the dollar but
the petrodollar.  I concur with you 100% that this is becoming ever more
an inescapably military regime.  But the very idea that this junta can
continue to project military force until it encircles the world
(effectively) is hallucinatory.  The Afghans and Iraqis are beginning to
undermine the 'demonstration' pretty substantially with some patience, a
lot of initiative, and a little audacity.  The currency battles are
surface forms, IMO, of a deep inter-regional conflict in an era of
increasingly rarified peripheral resources and tolerance.  They are also
a symptom of a profound energy crisis affecting the metropoles, wherein
control over those energy supplies has become a form of
military-economic leverage for the US to (attempt to) use against the
various regional efforts to break out.  It is the whacked-out hubris of
the neocons that is alarming sectors now in the US ruling class, who can
still count, and know that this global military adventure is a kind of
mindless Wagnerian overreach.  My bet is that the administration will go
down in flames next year.  There are already hints of their
class-brethren sharpening their knives.  I think the 'realists' are just
as deluded as the current crop of Rambo-wannabes, though probably less
apt to start a nuclear conflict - which is a real concern.  BTW, I have
thusfar been unable to obtain your book, which I am very keen to read.
But I'll try to follow up on some of the leads here.  Thanks for this
discussion.  Today alone has reminded me why I was on a-list in the
first place.  It also makes me feel yet another stab of grief about the
comrade who is not here for this.

I'll be talking with military family members in Fayetteville, NC (the
town where Ft Bragg is) tomorrow night.  Discontent and suspicion are
beginning to bubble there.  These are the folks who can strip away the
fig leaf of legitimacy from these gangsters.

Best

Stan